[OT] Re: Choosing the right kernel for XFS

[Walt H <waltabbyh@mindspring.com>]

I know this is a late reply and is somewhat off topic for the list, 
however, just wanted to chime in for completeness re: the opensource 
Promise drivers.

Yes, there are some "partially opensource drivers". They are packaged 
very similar to the Nvidia drivers. There is a binary only portion that 
you compile a wrapper around so it will work within your kernel 
version/config. I've found performance to be rather good, however, I 
can't vouch for stability yet. Also, at least in my case, getting them 
installed was quite a bear. You really need the combined documentation 
from one of their full installs targeted at Redhat or Suse as well as 
the small readme file that is part of the archive. Following their 
instructions to the letter, I was still left with many undefined symbols 
in the module, regardless of whether I compiled with or without 
dependencies. At any rate, once you get the module actually compiled and 
loadable at boot time, they work rather nicely and in my case using two 
7200 RPM IDE drives as a raid0 array, offer better performance than the 
md software raid in linux.


-Walt


Greg Freemyer wrote:
>  >>  Sounds too good to be true!
> 
>  >>  Anybody knows where I can find 'the promise patch' for 2.4.18?
> 
> 
>  >>  Karl
> 
> Try http://www.promise.com/support/support_eng.asp
> 
> FYI: 
> Traditionally the promise patches have been binary only.
> 
> They are built to apply to specific kernels.  I don't know if they support a vanilla kernels or not.
> 
> On another mailing list I read "Finally 2 days ago promise released a opensource module for Fasttrak100 raid 
> controller."
> 
> Maybe that means that promise is finally seeing the light.
> 
> Greg Freemyer
> Internet Engineer
> Deployment and Integration Specialist
> Compaq ASE - Tru64 v4, v5
> Compaq Master ASE - SAN Architect
> The Norcross Group
> www.NorcrossGroup.com
> 
>