Greetings,

I've just finished installing SL on a system with a 3ware 9xxx card in
it.  I thought it may be useful to other folks if I shared my
experience. I successfully used two different approaches.  I will
describe both...

Approach 1 - New kernel

This approach seem the most likely to work, since it would fix both the
install kernel and the boot kernel.  In the past I would have modified
the install images by hand, but this time I wanted to use the site
scripts to prepare everything.  Here are the steps I took.

* I created a patch to add the 3w-9xxx driver and a config option to
enable it.  I modified the kernel configs and rebuilt the various kernel
RPMs.  I then placed these rpms in my site/Updates directory.

* I modified the hwdata rpm to correct the pcitable.  The buildinstall
scripts blows this rpm apart to get the pcitable.  The rebuilt rpm goes
in the site/Updates directory.

* I modified modinfo in the anaconda rpm and rebuild the rpm.  The
buildinstall scripts also blows this rpm apart to create the install images.

* Run build.release.site.sh to create the new install images

This approach is a little tedious because you wind up having to modify
so many packages.  I think we may want to look at modifying anaconda to
pick up pcitable and modinfo files from an extra location to simply
things.  It took me a while to figure out that the buildinstall scripts
actually unpacks RPMs to create the various images.  I assumed it used
the files already present on the host.  However, it just uses these to
get started and most stuff comes from the RPMs.

Approach 2 - Use DKMS and driverdisk images

For those not familiar with DKMS, it is a framework for managing kernel
modules outside of the base kernel.  It was developed by folks at Dell
to manage drivers for things like Fibre Channel cards.  You can find it
here....  http://linux.dell.com/dkms/dkms.html

DKMS can build the driverdisk for you.  So I used it to create the
images.  I still was having trouble getting kickstart to use these
images though.  It winds up that if anaconda gets the driverdisk over
NFS (and maybe http and ftp) it can't be an msdos image.  Once I
repacked the driver disk in cramfs format it worked.  I also created an
RPM for the 3ware driver that DKMS uses to build modules for other kernels.


If anyone is interested in these modifications, let me know.  I'll be
happy to share any of the various RPMs and patches.

--Shane