Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Linux Software Hardware

Building ATA RAID and SMP Support into Slackware 9 171

Posted by timothy from the tomorrow's-computer-today dept.
TheMadPenguin writes "This HOWTO will describe the steps necessary to build support into Slackware Linux 9.0 for Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and a Promise Ultra ATA RAID redundant drive array. By default, there is no support for these configurations unless specified through a kernel recompilation after the initial install."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Building ATA RAID and SMP Support into Slackware 9 More

Building ATA RAID and SMP Support into Slackware 9

Comments Filter:

  • Uhm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ciryon ( 218518 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @05:56PM (#5717913) Journal
    If you choose to run Slackware, wouldn't you know how to do this?

    There are so many people that wanna run Linux and heard that slack is the coolest and most "pro" way to do it. Sickens me. :-P

    Ciryon

    • Re:Uhm... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by PhoenixK7 ( 244984 )
      Yeah, seriously. Some mildly experienced folks might find this useful, but how is this news?

      Its just a HOWTO.

      Oh well..

      • it's news. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )
        it's news because it is new (Posted on Saturday, April 12 @ 18:31:18 EDT ).

        that said, like the original poster, if you're running slack you should know how to add stuff like this without reading a howto.

        though maybe it saves few minutes for some people.. and gives distribution ranters some online time.

    • Re:Uhm... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Distros like gentoo/linux from scratch are the new l337. Slackware is no longer the king of hard.

      • Re:Uhm... (Score:3, Informative)

        by BrokenHalo ( 565198 )
        Slackware is no longer the king of hard.It doesn't pretend to be. It just works; it's one of the simplest distros, ideal for tweakers. The init scripts make sense to "real" unix heads, and if you want to recompile anything (or everything) from scratch, it won't stand in your way like rpm or perhaps even deb based systems will. Basically, it just gives you a world to stand on while you do it.
    • When someone waltzes into #slackware and demands that someone help him get it working, they can all yell back, with perfectly synconized timestamps, "RTFM or switch to Mandrake!"

    • If you choose to run Slackware, wouldn't you know how to do this?

      Not necessarily. I'm running Slackware 9 right now and I love it, but I've only been using Linux for a few months. I've never compiled anything besides my CS class projects, especially a kernel. I have never made any hardware changes after installing Linux, since I wouldn't know where to begin configuring it. Yeah, I could RTFM, but I have about a thousand other things to do for school and work, and I just want to be able to use my compute

    • Re:Uhm... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Dogun ( 7502 )
      yeah... slack is a bit too hardcore for the masses. Going with an entry level distro is probably the way to go. Then, if you find that Redhat and Mandrake are your mortal enemies, give slack a try. That's the story of my life. :) Never been happier... though I hear Gentoo is tight...
      • Slackware was the easy distribution!

        Lol, how far things have come.
        • Yeah, Slackware was pretty much point-and-drool (well, maybe type-and-drool) compared to SLS or TAMU. The hard part back then was stealing 40 floppies from your school/employer to put all of the install disks on. These kids today, I tell ya... :-)
          • Oh don't remind me. I remember trying to hold a stack of like twenty or more floppies between my index and middle fingers and my thumb and then suddenly feel it "let go" and have disks fly out like a deck of cards. The horror.
      • gentoo > slackware, IMO

        If you are a Slackware fan and haven't tried Gentoo, you owe it to yourself to check it out. I like Gentoo a lot, I also like Mandrake a lot. They are both excellent at what they do, that being a source-based distro and a package-based distro, respectively.

        • Gentoo is the Mandrake of Slashdot... You don't learn how to do anything besides run emerge. May as well run apt or urmpi, IMO.

          LFS is pretty cool but time-consuming. Slackware seems to strike a very happy medium. Using CheckInstall [asic-linux.com.mx] to make Slackware packages for anything I compile by hand, I get every benefit of Debian or pretty much all the RPM based distros without all the overhead and central control.

          A happy Slackware user since '95.

          • Gentoo is the Mandrake of Slashdot...

            Proofread, dammit... Gentoo is the Mandrake of Slackware, not Slashdot...

          • No way, dude! With Gentoo I can compile everything with the -supadupafast flag! It doesn't actually result in any performance improvement but the placebo effects are awesome!

            Seriously, when you hear people talk about comiling with optimizations under Gentoo, doesn't it remind you of a Mac user claiming his machine "feels a lot snappier" after a minor OS update?
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion
              • I saw a major improvement with -O6 Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that gcc, while it recognises optimisation flags up to 10, it doesn't actually do anything past -O3. Is that not hthe case?

            • You will see performance enhancements with Gentoo if you set up your compiler flags properly. I believe that the standard compiler flags for most distros these days is -march=i386 -mcpu=i686 -- produce code that'll run on anything Linux'll run on, but order them and optimize them for execution on P6 class machines.

              By specifying the proper -mcpu you can see some significant enhancements, especially (I'm speaking from history here, I haven't kept up with instruction ordering optimization since P5) since so

    • I've used Linux for about 6 years, and although I'm no guru, I've gone through many installs of every major distro on quite a few different machines. This time, upgrading from Slack 8.1, I got bad vibes from the start. The installer flaked out on me during partition setup, having to get the kernel sources separately is annoying (particularly since I have to have them to install Nvidia drivers) and overall I got the feeling that the whole thing was just slapped together. This is disapointing since the cre

      • Since I'm ranting about ease of use anyway, and maybe using my Imac is starting to jade me, but I'm getting tired of running ./configure, chasing down libraries, fixing compiler errors, and such in order to setup programs.

        Honestly that's not an issue on practically any distro. Personally I don't like the fact that I can almost never get the package I want, even with Debian and it's 10k packages. GNU-Radiusd, PostgreSQL with SSL support, qmail with the patches and options I think are relevant, (same wi

      • upgrading from Slack 8.1, I got bad vibes from the start. The installer flaked out on me during partition setup,

        Why are you fiddling with the partitions if you are upgrading Slackware or do you mean you are upgradeing by reinstalling?

        Which part of the installer setup? fdisk, formatting partitions, choosing the partition to install to, LILO setup?

        • I upgrade by reinstalling, then putting backed up files back on. I've learned I usually have less problems that way.

          It flaked out while setting partition mountpoints . After formatting and setting /, I had two other partitions I wanted to set, a /root and /boot. Setting the last one (either /root or /boot, didn't matter) would trigger something, and the installer would exit with a message about not being able to access some file. (obviously I don't have the exact message in front of me :)

      • maybe you should have looked at UPGRADE.TXT located in the root directory of the Slackware CD-ROM, it is as informative as it is useful. Can you guess why? Because Patrick Volkerding wrote it, and he hopes that you read it before trying to upgrade by running the Slackware installer, which, by the way, has nothing to do with upgrading.

        overall I got the feeling that the whole thing was just slapped together.

        Strangely enough, I got the feeling that Slackware 9.0 is an extremely well integrated and ref

    • The fact is, Slackware is a very barebones distro,
      The Slackware way is the DIY way, there are no config tools and *unstandard* config files to keep care of.
      I guess only Rock Linux goes beyond Slack in this matter.
      Then, usually it is easier than other distros to make it fit for your needs, of course, if you know what are you doing.

    • Great, now we have some dude complaining about too much documentation. Sheesh, if I had mod points I'd mod the parent up as a troll.
    • Yeah, they should have made a few tweaks to it and called it a RedHat/Mandrake guide. And wouldn't a simple kernel recompile be the same in every distro anyway? How is SW9.0 any different? BTW, I finally got Samba set up in SW9.0 so I could access the filesystem from within VMWare ... what a bitch :) Not bad for only having used Linux for six months now if I do say so myself. incripshin
    • Sorry about the other message ... forgot about HTML formatting. Should have previewed!

      Yeah, they should have made a few tweaks to it and called it a RedHat/Mandrake guide. And wouldn't a simple kernel recompile be the same in every distro anyway? How is SW9.0 any different?

      BTW, I finally got Samba set up in SW9.0 so I could access the filesystem from within VMWare ... what a bitch :) Not bad for only having used Linux for six months now, if I do say so myself.

      incripshin

    • slackware was the first linux distribution i ever used (exept from 15 min of redhat installation) and i'm still sticking to it. slackware is imho a perfect n00b distribution, as long as the n00b _wants_ to learn. it's not cool, it's functional. i never expected it to work out of the box, still don't ;)

      but, a howto like this one should definitely not be slackware specific. doesn't take much writing to include others as well.

      (If you choose to run Linux, wouldn't you know how to do this?) ;)

  • Why Slackware (Score:5, Informative)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Saturday April 12, 2003 @05:59PM (#5717924) Homepage
    Why is this Slackware specific. These instructions would work on most distros (with one or two small changes of where the boot kernel is kept). A better title would have been:

    Building ATA RAID and SMP Support into Your Kernel

    Those complaints asside, the guy knows what he's doing, so if you want to run RAID or SMP on your kernel, give it a read.

    • "Why is this Slackware specific. These instructions would work on most distros (with one or two small changes of where the boot kernel is kept)."

      That's because most other distributions already have a precompiled version of the SMP kernel.
    • well, slackware is seen by most professional users - that is, engineers, mathematicians, phyicists, chemists, etc -- as the best linux distribution of all time!!
  • From the office of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob):

    "Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and a Promise Ultra ATA RAID redundant drive arrays in Linux do not exist! It is a trick by the coalition forces!"

    More at 11.

  • Generic HOWTO would have sufficed? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lefty2446 ( 232351 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @06:03PM (#5717952) Homepage
    As I see it there is nothing drastically different with Slack to require a Slack specific HOWTO.

    This only complicates things more.
    http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO.html

    Would have sufficed,

    Adrian
  • Most of us Slackware Users already can do this, in our sleep...if you haven't compiled a Kernel a couple of hundred times, you probably aren'ta Slackware user!

    Just this past week, I compiled kernels for use on IBM X series e-server SMP systems and ServeRaid (ips) or MTP Fusion Chipsets...plus sound card support...A little tricky, and but no biggie.

    ttyl
    Farrell
    • I don't think this is true, even if it used to be. I'm still pretty new to linux, and I use Slack. I use slack because it respects standards. For instance, I was using Red Hat, and whenever I would ask my linux friends how to do something, they would reply with something along the lines of "just add such and such a line to such and such a file." Using Red Hat, this didn't work, because Red Hat put a lot of its configuration stuff in weird places. Now I'm using Slackware (installed with the help of a frie
    • "I compiled kernels for use on IBM X series e-server SMP systems and ServeRaid (ips) or MTP Fusion Chipsets...plus sound card support"

      Bah. Bigass systems, big disk arrays, whatever.

      it's cool that you got the sound working though...
      • "I compiled kernels for use on IBM X series e-server SMP systems and ServeRaid (ips) or MTP Fusion Chipsets...plus sound card support" Bah. Bigass systems, big disk arrays, whatever. it's cool that you got the sound working though...
        I really can't add to this. I guess I will just applaud. *applause*

  • RAID !=OS's job (Score:3, Insightful)

    by l33t-gu3lph1t3 ( 567059 ) <arch_angel16@NOspAM.hotmail.com> on Saturday April 12, 2003 @06:11PM (#5717996) Homepage
    all you need is to have the OS recognize and support the RAID controller. Actual RAID array building and configuring is a manual hardware task...
    • Come on, this is Slashdot. People here don't use hardware RAID; they use software IDE RAID.
      • *sigh* lol, when Promise ATA raid cards go for like 50 bucks...software raid sucks CPU cycles...
        • Like someone else already said Promise raid and low end raid cards are software raid.

          When I've had to use software raid on servers I always feel a lot better having the OS manage it as opposed to some cheap wanna-be "raid" card. Those cards are just one more piece of hardware that you have to worry about not only finding drivers for, but failing as well.

  • A (hopefully) good idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 3141 ( 468289 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @06:13PM (#5718010) Homepage
    OK, how about this for an idea. With Linux, support for most devices is already built in, and either "just works" or needs a recompile. How about, then, a set of diffs for different devices that you can apply to your /boot/config file to enable support? This way, people won't have to look up the HOWTOs and edit the file manually, but either get the diff direct from the Linux-savvy manufacturer or go to an unoffical webpage (like this one) and get it from there?

    So first you look up your device, then you apply the diff to your config file, then you recompile, then your device works.

    Am I missing out on anything? This would be very handy, and significantly reduce possibilities for manual-editing-screwups.
    • I'm not really an expert on this stuff (in fact, I'm pretty damn far from it) but I think the issue would be needing a different diff for every possible configuration, not just every device.

      So, ATAraid would be one diff, SMP would be another diff. However, applying both wouldn't work, so you'd need a third diff for ATAraid and SMP. At that point, it just gets confusing, especially since these diffs would only every apply to any single given kernel config.

      Seeing as the kernel itself is rather small, it's m
      • Hmm, I don't see why it would need a different diff for every possible combination. Just a minimal "turn this on, turn this on, turn this on". If the thing was already turned on, it wouldn't matter. Perhaps diff would be the wrong program to use, but the idea would remain the same.
        • Just make the make [menu|x]config smarter by adding some metacategories that automatically turn a set of things on, and you are set. I think they are working on rewriting the config stuff for 2.6 anyway, so it may already be this smart.

  • . . . if my Mom has to recompile the kernel just to get symmetric multiprocessing support and a working ATA raid array for chrissake??!!!

    -----

    • Most "consumer OSs" don't support SMP,
      and your mom dosn't have an ATA raid array (which almost always requires drivers)..

    • Is your Mom such a power user that she needs SMP and an ARRAY?

      If she is then she wont have any problem using and compiling linux.
    • Funny Not!

      You must of missed the Slackware reference in the article or maybe you haven't a clue what that might mean.


      • I want each of you who responded to the parent post to focus on me as best you can. Looking right at me? Okay, here we go:

        That was a joke. But I'm glad you all spoke up in defense of Slackware and Moms everywhere, because you have illustrated a very important point that might be useful to the Slashdot community as a whole, which is:

        IF YOU'RE HIGH, DON'T GO TO PUBLIC PLACES AND TRY TO MAKE A POINT.

        Weed is meant for simpler things. But if you really want to post high, make it something we can all enjoy, lik

        • That was a joke

          Yes but note that I said it was not funny. Just call it a seperation of humours or mabye I'm just so sick of the Desktop crowd that I see no humour in that subject. So in my opinion it wasn't funny, others have the right to differ

    • . . . if my Mom has to recompile the kernel just to get symmetric multiprocessing support and a working ATA raid array for chrissake??!!!

      Well, fortunately your Mom probably isn't interested in a RAID, but you know, if you could run Slackware on your new dual G4 Mac...well then you might actually have a point. But then, Slack's (mostly) just an x86 product.

  • Use Slackware's kernel source package. (Score:5, Informative)

    by volkerdi ( 9854 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @06:28PM (#5718083)
    It's better to use Slackware's kernel-source-2.4.20-noarch-5.tgz package, since it already contains patches for some ext3 bugs as well as the recent ptrace exploit.

    If you do use the original 2.4.20 tarball in the source/k directory, you will need to apply the linux-2.4.20.ptrace.diff.gz that you'll find in the same directory, and if you use ext3, you'll also want to apply the patches from the ext3-patches directory.
  • What's the point of this how-to again? All you need to do is recompile your kernel with those options built in. If you don't know how to recompile your kernel I think you have some more general linux reading to do.
  • how to get this slackware 9 raid smp to work on my MAndrake?

    Inspired by actual questions in #linux...

  • mistake, imho (Score:5, Informative)

    by doodleboy ( 263186 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @07:11PM (#5718246)
    article says: #> mv /lib/modules/2.4.20 /lib/modules/orig
    Bad bad bad. Now the original config is unbootable, a bad thing when you're monkeying around with the kernel. What you do is edit the kernel Makefile and add something to the extraversion parameter, i.e.:

    EXTRAVERSION = -smp_raid

    Then you'll have two entries under /lib/modules, 2.4.20 and 2.4.20-smp_raid. Make the appropriate entries in /etc/lilo.conf and you can boot either one. Disabling a stock, working kernel config is lunacy. Using extraversion is obviously the safer method, that's what it's for. This is all mentioned in the kernel HOWTO, iirc.
    • Again, for the billionth time, folks, /usr/src/linux IS NOT supposed to be a symlink to the current kernel sources.
      /usr/src/linux SHOULD link to the kernel headers in place when glibc was compiled.

      Therefore you may safely have

      uname -r

      Linux 2.5.25

      /usr/src/linux-2.5.25
      /usr/src/linux-2.2.19
      /usr/src/linux->linux-2.2.19

      • Well, I dunno... IIRC Linus has mentioned that multiple times, but I've been symlinking my latest source directory to /usr/src/linux for several years now (from 2.0.32 or so), and I've never once struck a problem.

        But, if you're paranoid, I suppose it's good advice.
        • You won't have a problem until you upgrade glibc.
          Actually, you probably won't have a problem until you upgrade glibc and THEN run something you've compiled afterwards. Then shit should get interesting.

          Believe me, it's not something you want to try to track down, cause once you find out all that trouble could've been solved if you hadn't done something Linus himself told you not to do, you'll feel stupider than a win95 user.
      • While I am perfectly willing to accept your prose as gospel, I'm interested in knowing some background information about why doing what you say is a Good Thing.

        I've been running Slackware for eight years, with /usr/src/linux symlinked to whatever kernel I happen to be running this week. Nary a problem.

        So, please educate - even if it is for the billionth+1 time.

        • There's plenty of info available googling - check the lkml archives for Linus' position on the subject.

          basically, /usr/src is a system directory. When you compile libs, /usr/src/linux is where your system is going to look for symbol/function definitions. These must be the same headers that glibc was compiled with.

          otherwise, look at my reply to the other reply. My experience was upgrading glibc, upgrading the kernel (changing the symlink), and proceeding to compile perl, openssl, apache, et al. IIRC, opens
      • This is ONLY true if your system boneheadedly sets up the /usr/lib kernel header classes as symlinks into /usr/src/linux rather than copying them. Gentoo and LFS aren't like that, I'm not sure which linux distro's still do this.
      • How can I have missed something so obvious.

        It sucks to be me.

        I'll throw my sorry self in a cage full of hungry penguins. DO not blame anybody for my untimely but just demise.

  • from the department of redundancy department (Score:5, Funny)

    by Erpo ( 237853 ) on Saturday April 12, 2003 @08:00PM (#5718447)
    This HOWTO will describe the steps necessary to build support into Slackware Linux 9.0 for [...] RAID redundant drive array.

    ...or even a RAID redundant independent drive array, or a RAID redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) drives (or disks). Hey, that's getting a little long...maybe an acronym would be useful here. How about: RAID RAID!

    Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.
    • Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.

      Will I need to upgrade my RAM memory? I'll have to stop at an ATM machine on my way to Fry's...
      • Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.

        Will I need to upgrade my RAM memory? I'll have to stop at an ATM machine on my way to Fry's...

        I suspect so -- be sure to get "Random Access" RAM. That's the kind GNU's GCC Collection tends to suck down when it's building ATA Attachment drivers into the kernel, which you'll probably need if you want to get the extra source off of your distro's CD Disc and store it on you
  • And people wonder why Linux isn't ready for primetime. Here's a "HOWTO" for installing Promise RAID drivers during a Windows XP install:

    Press F6.

  • About Promise RAID controllers: When running a mirror, or a spanned mirror, what is the sychronization software for? The controller should be writing the same data to both hard drives. Promise tech support has never been able to answer this.

    The readme file says this:

    "- SYNCHRONIZATION
    This is a maintenance operation for Mirrored (RAID1) arrays. It will compare data on drives for differences. If there are differences it will automatically copy data from the first disk to the second disk in the arra
  • I have ASUS P4S8X mobo and RH9 doesn't support not only RAID (which is based on PDC20368 if I'm not mistaken) but network adapter and sound, too. This is a very popular board, so it would be great for a lot of folks to know how to make Linux work on it.
  • Speaking of RAID, has anyone been able to get the Promise Fasttrak SX4000 [promise.com] to work under FreeBSD and/or Gentoo Linux?

    "The first low-cost, high-performance RAID 5 host adapter with all the RAID features you want, at a price you won't believe [about $150]" was touted to work under RedHat Linux, however I have been unable to coax it to work under Gentoo or FreeBSD.

    (gnashes teeth)

  • Thanks for the info, MadPenguin. I've been using my ATA RAID controller as just another IDE controller. I've been too lazy to fiddle with it since Slack 8.1, and haven't needed the extra speed or redundancy (Slack with ReiserFS is really fast). I recently installed Slack 9, but I will keep this FAQ in mind when I upgrade to an Opteron machine with a new ATA RAID controller.
  • First off, this is by no means ment to be a flame of any type.
    That said, why would someone who wanted use a promise controller (RAID) under any O.S.? If you want mirroring, there is the 3ware 2 chan cards, and if you want more, there are the 4+ chan cards. And, the last time I looked, you had to run the mknod command about a dozen times to get things to maybe work. *searches for major/minor #'s*
    And as far as SMP? Anyone running SMP should know how to RTFM, at a very min.
    One other thing, if your sys
  • This ins't a troll but why does this howto exist? Doesn't the Linux Raid [tldp.org] and SMP HOWTO [tldp.org] cover this. TLDP.org [tlpd.org] is all you need

    Rus
  • Well, I suppose you'd start by compiling the support into the kernel and then, uh, run it?
  • I recall installaing a RAID on RedHat 7.1, it was a bit trickier though, but it did the job.....

Slashdot Top Deals

As you will see, I told them, in no uncertain terms, to see Figure one. -- Dave "First Strike" Pare

Close