Dell 2950 and/or Perc 5i issues

[Langdon Stevenson]

Daniel Jabbour wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I’ve recently acquired some Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers.  I loaded 
> Fedora Core 6 on them fine, did a yum update and much to my surprise the 
> box kernel panics on boot.  I haven’t loaded anything else on the box, 
> other than a stock OS.
> 
> I did some investigation and determined the issue only occurs with the 
> latest (2.6.22.1-32) kernel.  It did not occur with 2.6.20 or 2.6.18.  
> It seems that the drivers for the Perc 5i controller (megaraid_sas) is 
> seeing through the BIOS of the controller and showing all 6 disks rather 
> than one logical volume.  Since the volume is actually RAID 10, it 
> cannot mount the root filesystem. 
> 
> This problem seem very similar to one detailed in an older kernel on the 
> Ubuntu bug tracker:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/55138
>
> I also noticed that the bug has a patch applied in Ubuntu:
> 
> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/57265
>
> Is this issue known in the Fedora world?  What do you suggest I do to 
> resolve it?  Is this the appropriate list for this, or is there another 
> one that would be more pertinent?  Why would the Ubuntu patch not be 
> also applied to the FC6 kernel, wouldn’t it have patched the kernel.org 
> kernel and shouldn’t it have made its way over to Fedora? Or, could this 
> be a new issue?  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks,

Hi Daniel

I have just gone through the same issue with a Dell PowerEdge 2300 with 
a Perc2/SC controller.  F7 uses an updated version of the Megaraid 
controller that nolonger supports my card.  Yours may have a similar 
issue.  There are instructions on the net to help you revert to an older 
version of the Megaraid controller.  This is the best resource I can 
find for switching the driver:

http://www.tuxyturvy.com/blog/index.php?/archives/4-Installing-RHEL4-on-Systems-with-Legacy-Megaraid-Drivers.html

Sadly it doesn't help me as I can't even get the installer working (as I 
am limited to an HTTP or FTP install, which seems to be broken on F7 
(unless anyone can point out how to do it?  The installer always fails 
to download stage2.img)

Hope this might help you with your server.  It is frustrating that 
support for the older hardware is being dropped.  This equipment is 
perfect for small/home offices.  It would be great if there was an easy 
method of specifying the driver that you want to use during.  I have 
read that one driver can't support all of these old Perc cards, so the 
question is: why not supply both drivers?

My solution has been to install Debian on my Dell.  Apparently it has 
the older megaraid driver in the installer and everything works fine.  I 
am sad to have to dump Fedora on this machine, but couldn't justify days 
of hassle to get it running.

Regards,
Langdon