CentOS - Dec 2006 - 4.4/64-bit Supermicro/ Nvidia Sata RAID Driver

Hi,

I am installing Centos ServerCD 4.4 64-bit on a new Supermicro board, 
the RAID BIOS looks fine, RAID 5, all 4 Seagate ES 250 GB drives show up 
as a single array in the RAID BIOS tool, and the OS install phase 
completes without a hitch.

One thing I noticed was that the OS was loading the sata_nv driver and 
picking up the 4 Sata drives instead of the large RAID5 volume, it 
should just appear as one big 1TB drive.  Usually it should see the RAID 
and not worry about loading the sata driver per se from what I remember...

When the OS install completes and I reboot, I simply get a blinking cursor.

On consulting Amax/ Supermicro, they write:

---snip----
Since this Supermicro model was just recently released, it is possible 
that the drivers on your installation disk are out of date. 
Supermicro suggested downloading the latest Redhat Driver from their FTP 
Site at:
 
ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SATA/nVidia/MCP55/Linux/Redhat
choose either:
 
  For 32-bit
 
File: nvsata-rhel4.4-0.11-1.21.i686.img 
<ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SATA/nVidia/MCP55/Linux/Redhat/nvsata-rhel4.4-0.11-1.21.i686.img>
1440 KB 7:03:00 PM
 
or for 64-bit
 
 File: nvsata-rhel4.4-0.11-1.21.x86_64.img 
<ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SATA/nVidia/MCP55/Linux/Redhat/nvsata-rhel4.4-0.11-1.21.x86_64.img>
1440 KB 7:04:00 PM

----snip----

My question is how, during the install, do I specify this driver?  Right 
now the OS simply reads out sata_nv as it progresses, but I see no 
interrupt point where it allows one to 're-specify' or otherwise 
encourage the OS to utilize this updated .img file supermicro is suggesting.

Any suggestions on the step-by-step sequence for this?

bonus/ p.s. -anyone had any experience with the Nvidia onboard RAID/ 
Supermicros?  Did you like it, (I'm an LSI-Logic fan myself), just 
looking for opinions...

-karlski

Hello Karl,
> Any suggestions on the step-by-step sequence for this?
> 
> bonus/ p.s. -anyone had any experience with the Nvidia onboard RAID/ 
> Supermicros?  Did you like it, (I'm an LSI-Logic fan myself), just 
> looking for opinions...
NVRaid is not supported as there is no NVRaid driver for Linux. NVRaid 
also belongs to what Linux kernel developers call 'fake-raid'. It is 
really just some RAID Bios coupled with a software RAID driver.

You are better off using them as individual disks and Linux software 
raid instead.

Karl R. Balsmeier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am installing Centos ServerCD 4.4 64-bit on a new Supermicro board,
> the RAID BIOS looks fine, RAID 5, all 4 Seagate ES 250 GB drives show up
> as a single array in the RAID BIOS tool, and the OS install phase
> completes without a hitch.
As others pointed out, the hardware you have has no RAID controller.
It's just fake-RAID BIOS thing.  Linux sees your hardware as what it
really is.  An ordinary SATA controller with 4 individual drives
attached to it.  That's why it loads sata_nv driver (which is correct
driver for your hardware).

The reason why booting fails is most likely due to the fact that your
BIOS is attempting to emulate (in software) RAID-5 volume when loading
boot loader, kernel and initrd image.  While in reality those are
probably stored on your first drive.

Simply disable fake-RAID in BIOS.  You might not even need to reinstall.

If you choose to reinstall, and want everything on RAID-5:

- disable fake-RAID in BIOS (let it be what it is, SATA controller with
4 individual drives)
- create two small partitions (around 100MB) on first two drives.
Configure them as Linux software RAID-1.  Use it as /boot
- use remaining space on all four drives as one big partition, create
Linux software RAID-5, use that as physical volume, carve logical
volumes for rest of your system out of it.

There's also a project that uses device-mapper and an user space utility
to support fake-RAID functionality in BIOS.  Basically, the user space
utility reads out fake-RAID metadata and configures device mapper.
However, this is still not something you would get working out of the
box.  You'd need to manually hack scripts in initrd image and add user
space utility to it.  Also, I don't think it would work with RAID-5.
RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-10 configurations might work.
> bonus/ p.s. -anyone had any experience with the Nvidia onboard RAID/
> Supermicros?  Did you like it, (I'm an LSI-Logic fan myself), just
> looking for opinions...
Well.  It is not RAID.  Just an ordinary SATA controller.  See above.

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Hi all!
I need this PHP extension.
I'm in CentOS 4.4, plus extras, plus, dag, freshrpm and rpmforge repos, 
but I can't find it.
I found libmcrypt, but PHP seems ignore it... Ah, I use PHP5, MySQL5 and 
Apache 2.2
I tried to hand write right conf of *.ini PHP conf files, and I tried to 
manually soft-link libraries in php.d/modules/.. folder, but nothing works.
So I would know if there's a Centos repos for this extension.
FC5 repos have it, but I don't know if including a Fedora repos into 
CentOS would be high risk....

Can someone make me know?
Thank you guys, and girls, of course...! ;-)

Nando
Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale! 
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com

Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
>Karl R. Balsmeier wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I am installing Centos ServerCD 4.4 64-bit on a new Supermicro board,
>>the RAID BIOS looks fine, RAID 5, all 4 Seagate ES 250 GB drives show up
>>as a single array in the RAID BIOS tool, and the OS install phase
>>completes without a hitch.
>>    
>>
>
>As others pointed out, the hardware you have has no RAID controller.
>It's just fake-RAID BIOS thing.  Linux sees your hardware as what it
>really is.  An ordinary SATA controller with 4 individual drives
>attached to it.  That's why it loads sata_nv driver (which is correct
>driver for your hardware).
>
>The reason why booting fails is most likely due to the fact that your
>BIOS is attempting to emulate (in software) RAID-5 volume when loading
>boot loader, kernel and initrd image.  While in reality those are
>probably stored on your first drive.
>
>Simply disable fake-RAID in BIOS.  You might not even need to reinstall.
>
>If you choose to reinstall, and want everything on RAID-5:
>
>- disable fake-RAID in BIOS (let it be what it is, SATA controller with
>4 individual drives)
>- create two small partitions (around 100MB) on first two drives.
>Configure them as Linux software RAID-1.  Use it as /boot
>- use remaining space on all four drives as one big partition, create
>Linux software RAID-5, use that as physical volume, carve logical
>volumes for rest of your system out of it.
>
>There's also a project that uses device-mapper and an user space utility
>to support fake-RAID functionality in BIOS.  Basically, the user space
>utility reads out fake-RAID metadata and configures device mapper.
>However, this is still not something you would get working out of the
>box.  You'd need to manually hack scripts in initrd image and add user
>space utility to it.  Also, I don't think it would work with RAID-5.
>RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-10 configurations might work.
>
>  
>
>>bonus/ p.s. -anyone had any experience with the Nvidia onboard RAID/
>>Supermicros?  Did you like it, (I'm an LSI-Logic fan myself), just
>>looking for opinions...
>>    
>>
>
>Well.  It is not RAID.  Just an ordinary SATA controller.  See above.
>
>  
>
disappointing, but it's true.  Supermicro verified what all of you 
said.  And since I'm not very interested in software RAID, i'll be 
dropping a hardware RAID card in and let my vendor know not to try and 
sell any more of these to those intending to use a Linux OS.

I'll try out your software RAID steps to give me something to play with 
till the hardware card shows up, since they are very clear and concise.  
Maybe it'll soften the empty 'no hardware raid5' feeling one has at
present.

-krb