Seth,
Many thanks for your input on this. Ill go the non-kernel-mod route. Any
Idea if Alan has his drivers available? Id be inclined to give them a go
as opposed to compiling the Emulex drivers from what you have mentioned.
This box is not a production machine but rater a system at my home that
I'm using for some testing and a repository for a few files laying round
so I'm really not afraid to try things with it.
At any rate, thanks for your input.
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Seth Mos
Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2001 7:52 AM
To: Matt Avila; linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: FW: Suggestions on Emulex Driver build w XFS
At 18:19 8-12-2001 -0500, Matt Avila wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > I've been following this discussion group for some time and am
> > currently running kernel 2.4.9-13 w/ XFS 1.0.2 on an Intel board/CPU
> > combo. I've also installed dual Emulex LP8000's that will be AL_PA
> > connected to storage in the interim. Ill be moving these to FC_SW in
> > the near future.
> >
> > My questions are I have a few choices in building the driver (for
> > the fibre cards) either as a standalone module or to install it
> > under the /usr/src/linux kernel subtree. Any suggestions on "best
> > practices" for configuring this with XFS? Anyway, I've got a bit
> > more than 1/2 TB that I'm just itching to format & run with.
Binary drivers are dangerous waters and upgrading your kernel may
suddenly
break the driver or the kernel and produce dataloss, lockups and
corruption.
Looking at what adaptec did with their raid solution which is found
onboard
of a lot of prefab servers and goes by the name of aacraid. Better avoid
that. People have seen a myriad of problems in the past and even today
when some
boxes still die under heavy load.
Alan Cox has just made a real linux driver for these cards which after
some
testing by people shows that even at 0.9.2 the card survives all forms
of
crashtesting which is something incredible for a complete rewrite. I
have
no word on the performance yet. We officially scrapped these cards 1
month
after purchase of the machine and used a card with a driver that was
generally available and working.
I suspect that if you go the closed binary path it will be full of bumps
and potholes. A risk that I am not willing to take.
Cheers
--
Seth
Every program has two purposes one for which
it was written and another for which it wasn't
I use the last kind.
|