CentOS - Apr 2007 - CentOS5, kernel update and 3ware driver

I'm using CentOS5 64bit on a system with a 3ware 9650SE card.

I installed the OS using the driver disk files provided by 3ware. It 
worked fine with the original CentOS5 kernel.

After doing a "yum update", which also installed an updated kernel,
the
system didn't work after a reboot, using the new kernel.
I rebooted the old kernel, moved the 3w-9xxx.ko file from 
/lib/modules/2.6.18-8.el5/updates to 
/lib/modules/2.6.18-8.1.1.el5/updates then did this:

mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-2.6.18-8.1.1.el5.img 2.6.18-8.1.1.el5

The initrd image for the new kernel was rebuilt without apparent issues. 
I booted up the new kernel and now it seems to work fine.


So here's my question:
The system _appears_ to work fine with the updated kernel and the driver 
module from 3ware that was made for the original kernel. But this is a 
machine that is supposed to be very reliable, so I'm wondering, do I 
have to rebuild the driver for the new kernel, or can I just use the 
existing driver version without problems?
The emphasis here is on reliability.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/

Florin Andrei wrote:
> 
> I rebooted the old kernel, moved the 3w-9xxx.ko file from 
> /lib/modules/2.6.18-8.el5/updates to 
> /lib/modules/2.6.18-8.1.1.el5/updates then did this:
copied, not "moved"

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/

Florin Andrei wrote:
> I'm using CentOS5 64bit on a system with a 3ware 9650SE card.
What kind of performance are you seeing with this card?  I've just 
installed CentOS5 64-bit on one of my sandbox systems today and it's got 
a 9550SX with 8 500gig Seagate barracudas in RAID0 config.  Performance 
seems to have improved a bit compared to 4.4.  I'm now seeing about 
200MB/sec for writes and about 405MB/sec for reads.  Fortunately, the 
9550 driver seems to be included in the kernel so doing updates hasn't 
broken things for me.  :) 

I noticed a lot of 3rd party apps haven't caught up yet so there are 
still issues with missing/conflicting libs for all the naughty bits 
(various mpeg codecs/tools/players/etc).

Cheers,

Florin Andrei wrote:
> The system _appears_ to work fine with the updated kernel and the driver 
> module from 3ware that was made for the original kernel. But this is a 
> machine that is supposed to be very reliable, so I'm wondering, do I 
> have to rebuild the driver for the new kernel, or can I just use the 
> existing driver version without problems?
> The emphasis here is on reliability.
> 
just as these .ko worked fine in centos-4 from kernel to kernel, they 
should really continue to work fine in centos-5, you wont need to 
rebuild them at all, till such time as this driver gets adopted upstream 
into the distro kernel and you dont need it anymore :)

- KB

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq