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ctl
n00b
Joined: 05 Mar 2009
Posts: 16
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 Posted: Thu Mar 05, 2009 11:29 pm Post subject: nforce4 BIOS raid, dmraid, genkernel... |
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I'm nearly to the point of giving up and just buying a raid card. This post is a last desperate attempt to get this to work. I'm no expert, so I'm probably just missing something incredibly simple. Any help is greatly appreciated!
I have an ASUS A8N-E motherboard with the nforce4 chipset, and an AMD Athlon64 3500+ cpu. The drives are four Seagate 1TB SATA drives configured in the BIOS as 0+1 raid.
The system boots fine with the LiveCD and the array is mapped correctly in /dev/mapper using the LiveCD with the "dodmraid" option, and everything else works fine. The problem is configuring the kernel. Using "genkernel --dmraid all" with the default (ie., almost everything included) genkernel configuration works.... sort of. The array gets mapped fine using this kernel but eth0 does not exist. I don't want a bloated kernel, especially one that breaks the onboard ethernet.
I've tried configuring my own, starting with Pappy's kernel seed: http://62.3.120.141/~pappy/. GRUB comes up, it starts to boot, and then it fails when trying to access the root partition.
I'm trying to configure the kernel doing:
| Code: | | genkernel --dmraid --menuconfig all |
I just can't figure out which magic module I need to check off to get it to boot.
Here's my partition layout:
| Code: | livecd ~ # fdisk /dev/mapper/nvidia_deadeafe
Command (m for help): p
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/mapper/nvidia_deadeafe1 * 1 5 40131 83 Linux
/dev/mapper/nvidia_deadeafe2 6 255 2008125 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/mapper/nvidia_deadeafe3 256 8224 64010992+ 83 Linux
/dev/mapper/nvidia_deadeafe4 8225 243202 1887460785 5 Extended
/dev/mapper/nvidia_deadeafe5 8225 238539 1850005206 83 Linux
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The first partition is the boot partition and the third is the root.
Here is the output of lspci:
| Code: | livecd ~ # lspci
00:00.0 Memory controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Memory Controller (rev a3)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 ISA Bridge (rev a3)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation CK804 SMBus (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a2)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 IDE (rev f2)
00:07.0 RAID bus controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
00:08.0 RAID bus controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:0a.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev a3)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV410 [Radeon X700 (PCIE)]
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV410 [Radeon X700 (PCIE)] (Secondary)
05:07.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
05:08.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7131/SAA7133/SAA7135 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev d0)
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And lspci -n, which can be pasted here: http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/
| Code: | livecd ~ # lspci -n
00:00.0 0580: 10de:005e (rev a3)
00:01.0 0601: 10de:0050 (rev a3)
00:01.1 0c05: 10de:0052 (rev a2)
00:02.0 0c03: 10de:005a (rev a2)
00:02.1 0c03: 10de:005b (rev a3)
00:04.0 0401: 10de:0059 (rev a2)
00:06.0 0101: 10de:0053 (rev f2)
00:07.0 0104: 10de:0054 (rev f3)
00:08.0 0104: 10de:0055 (rev f3)
00:09.0 0604: 10de:005c (rev a2)
00:0a.0 0680: 10de:0057 (rev a3)
00:0b.0 0604: 10de:005d (rev a3)
00:0c.0 0604: 10de:005d (rev a3)
00:0d.0 0604: 10de:005d (rev a3)
00:0e.0 0604: 10de:005d (rev a3)
00:18.0 0600: 1022:1100
00:18.1 0600: 1022:1101
00:18.2 0600: 1022:1102
00:18.3 0600: 1022:1103
01:00.0 0300: 1002:5e4d
01:00.1 0380: 1002:5e6d
05:07.0 0280: 14e4:4318 (rev 02)
05:08.0 0480: 1131:7133 (rev d0) |
Thank you,
Paul |
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pappy_mcfae
Watchman
Joined: 27 Dec 2007
Posts: 5999
Location: Pomona, California.
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| Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2009 7:38 am Post subject: |
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Post your .config, and I'll see what I can see...the one you made with a seed, not the genkernel special.
Blessed be!
Pappy
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HeissFuss
Guru
Joined: 11 Jan 2005
Posts: 414
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| Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 4:07 pm Post subject: |
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Are you also going to access this raid array from Windows? If not, I'd suggest setting it up as an mdraid instead of using the bios raid. You'll get better results (speed and stability.)
However, you'll still need to get your kernel configured correctly  . |
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Malvineous
Apprentice
Joined: 20 Oct 2006
Posts: 281
Location: Brisbane, Australia
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| Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 10:36 pm Post subject: |
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Yes definitely, avoid using BIOS RAID if you can help it. Just make a small partition on one of the drives for your kernel image (as last time I checked GRUB couldn't boot directly off a RAID-0 image) and set that as your boot/GRUB partition. Set your other partitions to md-autodetect and it should just work with any kernel that has the md driver built in. Don't forget to build in the driver for your IDE/SATA/SCSI chipset either, if you're compiling your own kernel. (If you're missing that you won't see any disks detected during the boot process.)
Also think twice about a hardware RAID card, it seems that you need to spend thousands on one to get performance better than Linux software RAID... |
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bytesniper
n00b
Joined: 12 Mar 2006
Posts: 33
Location: Abq, NM
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| Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 6:07 am Post subject: |
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mdraid is incredibly good. 2 sata drives striped with mdraid is faster then the 2 drives i have striped using nvraid. anyway, yes boot can contained in a mdraid partition as long as its mirrored. the way i've got mine setup is 3 paritions per drive all exactly identical. i set it up this way before chrooting. i parition as follows:
/dev/sd[ab]1: 100mb/drive - boot - parition type fd
/dev/sd[ab]2: 2048mb/drive - swap - parition type 82
/dev/sd[ab]3: rest of drive - root - parition type fd
in the minimal install environment first make the device nodes:
mknod /dev/md0 b 9 0
mknod /dev/md1 b 9 1
then assign paritions to md raid device
mdadm -Cv /dev/md0 -l 1 -n 2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 #(configures boot md0 to use sda1 and sdb1 raid level 1 number of devices 2)
mdadm -Cv /dev/md1 -l 0 -n 2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 #(configures root md1 to use sda3 and sdb3 raid level 0 number of devices 2)
format md0 and md1. i usually format boot with ext2.
mount /dev/md1 to /mnt/gentoo and /dev/md0 /mnt/gentoo/boot and continue stage 3 as normal. as long as you configure your kernel with raid level 0 and 1 support and setup your fstab correctly it should boot without a problem. dont bother setting swap drives (sd[ab]2 as an md raid device, when both are added to fstab they should, in theory, automatically stripe. quick and dirty semi-accurate speed test when you get done: hdparm -Tt /dev/md1
bytesniper |
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justinkb
Apprentice
Joined: 23 Dec 2008
Posts: 161
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| Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 5:45 pm Post subject: |
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| +1 for mdraid. running like a beauty here. |
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danomac
l33t
Joined: 06 Nov 2004
Posts: 881
Location: Vancouver, BC
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| Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 6:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Malvineous wrote: | | Also think twice about a hardware RAID card, it seems that you need to spend thousands on one to get performance better than Linux software RAID... |
Maybe not thousands, but for a true hardware RAID is easily in the $700-$800 range. I have a rocketraid 2320 that I use in addition to the nforce4 raid, it was ~$300, but it still uses a bit of cpu power to use the raid.
I have the nforce4 chipset on my Striker II Extreme board running in raid10. I need to share it with Windows, so I don't have a choice. I also had to use genkernel, but I did tweak it with only the hardware that I needed.
If you post your kernel config I can compare it to mine to see if there's something missing. |
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ctl
n00b
Joined: 05 Mar 2009
Posts: 16
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| Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 3:30 pm Post subject: |
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Thank you everyone for the help.
I gave up and forgot about this for the last two weeks until today. I finally got it to work today. I'm not sure what exactly did it, as I was a bit gratuitous with what I included in the kernel. Here's my kernel config for those interested: http://pastebin.com/f2dcc8e59
After reading the replies hear, I'm now going to have to consider mdraid. Is it really that much better? |
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