On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Michael Hannon wrote:

> Greetings.  One of the guys I work with has been getting a lot of grief 
> lately, trying to install and upgrade Scientific Linux (versions 3 and 
> 4) on computers that include SATA drives and/or some kind of built-in 
> RAID capability.  I've appended a copy of his recent note to me, 
> requesting help.
> 
> I realize that this is a little vague, but I wonder if others in the SL 
> community have experienced any similar problems.  We've generally had 
> very little trouble with SL on older hardware.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 					- Mike
> 
> I've successfully installed SL 3.0.3 on [the Professor's] new Dell 
> Optiplex GX 620. The installation works when I disable the SATA drives 
> by changing the SATA BIOS settings to accommodate the legacy hardware 
> such as PATA drives ("combination" mode).  I can install SL 3.0.3 which 
> does work with the vanilla kernel (2.4.20-21.EL, I think).  When I 
> update the kernel (kernel-2.4.21-32.0.1.EL), the system will get a 
> "kernel panic" upon the next reboot.  I believe this has a lot to do 
> with the SATA drives.
> 
> I've run mkinit to try and load the modules into a new initrd for the 
> new kernel--no success.

I have a GX620 on order (2 weeks now), because we will may end up getting
a bunch later in the year (long story).  We have so far been unable to
tell what devices have changed between the GX280 and the 620, though
another part of the university (which runs suse9x) told us that it worked
for them:

    "with minor updates to drivers"

and so far have ignored our requests for info on *which* drivers need
updating (or give us the list of pci-ids).

Anyway, back to the plot.

When we first saw the GX280 (we ordered a GX270 and Dell shipped the wrong
model) I tested it with an early SL3 (302 I think), and it had all sorts
of problems with the SATA controller.  Later when we actually bought one
to test SL304 worked flawlessly (well XFree86 can only drive the video in
SVGA mode, but it *does* work).

In case you can compare the lspci output of a GX280 to the 620 here are 
the relevant lines from a 280:

$ lspci -n | egrep 'Class (03|0101|0200)'
00:02.0 Class 0300: 8086:2582 (rev 04)
00:02.1 Class 0380: 8086:2782 (rev 04)
00:1f.1 Class 0101: 8086:266f (rev 03)
00:1f.2 Class 0101: 8086:2651 (rev 03)
02:00.0 Class 0200: 14e4:1677 (rev 01)

Class 03xx is video, 0101 is IDE (PATA/SATA), and 0200 is the nic.  The 
textual descriptions (in this case) are:

$ lspci | egrep 'Graphics|IDE interface|Ethernet controller'
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp. 82915G Express Chipset Family Graphics Controller (rev 04)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corp. 82915G Express Chipset Family Graphics Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FW (ICH6/ICH6W) SATA Controller (rev 03)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01)

That graphics chipset is the "onboard", the only other options (we have)  
are ATI X300 and X600 neither of which are supported by XFree86 either.

The main annoyance we have atm is that 8086:266f (the PATA IDE
controller), doesn't get driven in DMA mode (the chipset isn't
detected/supported).

However that seems to be the chipset on many of Intel's boards too now 
(e.g. the D915 systems), so we will just have to wait for the kernel to 
catch up.

-- 
Jon Peatfield,  Computer Officer,  DAMTP,  University of Cambridge
Mail:  [log in to unmask]     Web:  http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/