A Penguin in Purple Clothing

Thursday October 07, 2004

Got the LSI card working

The problem with the card turned out to the be the firmware of the SAS drive from Fujitsu. Once that was updated, the drive loaded and I was able to play with it on Linux.

In other news, I went to the Palo Alto office of Sun to help bringup an Opteron board in anticipation of our own efforts. They had never tested 64-bit Linux on the system (only 32 bit Linux and 32 bit Windoze). Got that up and mostly working. Unfortunately, the link to the Palo Alto office is only over a T1, so getting the software loaded was taking forever. I will be going back next week to finish what I started.

I wanted to go today, but they didn't have a board for me to work on. It seems that as soon as they get a board working and debugged, it is snatched up for somebody in the company and leaves their office.

I am off tomorrow with my finace to go to Massachusettes and Maine to scope out a place to potentially get married next summer. I will be back on Tuesday. (2004-10-07 13:21:37.0) Permalink

Thursday September 30, 2004

No luck on the LSI SAS 1064

Yesterday, I wanted to test the status of hotplug under Linux. I had a beta board from LSI that is a Serial Access SCSI card. This is a PCI 3.3 volt board, so it didn't go into the 5 volt boards from Nvidia. I reinstalled an old Tyan system that was laying in pieces in the lab that has PCI-X 3.3 slots. I slapped Fedora Core 2 on there, latest kernel updates, but it didn't recognize the card. I figured it wouldn't because this is still early access silicon. So, I checked in the kernel for which driver might be close to work on this card.

The mpt driver is from LSI and is in drivers/message/fusion. I tried to load that driver, but it did not attach to the card. I figured I may need an even more up to date kernel. So, I compiled 2.6.9-rc2 and put that on there. No luck.

I decided I might have to dive into the driver, so I started to look at the code. Lo and behold, it was not attaching to PCI id 0x0050 which was the LSI card. I added in that, plus another line to identifiy the 1064 card in the kernel messages. Compiled, installed, and the driver attached! But, it did not see any drives.

This morning, I got an email from the LSI representative with the latest version of their driver, 3.02.04. I was using 3.01.16 which is the one in 2.6.9-rc2. I compiled this new driver and installed it. It attached without issue to the LSI card, but I *still* don't see any drives. Arg.

So, I still don't have the ability to test hotplug on this SAS card. Maybe I can get a better dialog going with the LSI engineers.

(2004-09-30 11:14:44.0) Permalink

Wednesday September 08, 2004

Opteron Systems

So, I got my dual Opteron PCI Express system back up again. When I first got the board, Q and I stuck in into a temorary case. Now that we got the permanent cases in, Q transfered the board. Alas, a few issues arrose. For one, the video card was removed for another system, so I had to move that back (it is a Nvidia PCI Express Geforce 5300). But, I wasn't getting any display working. Turns out it was because it was going through a bad Belkin KVM. Once I hooked up the video card directly to the monitor, it worked fine. Although it wasn't finding the hard drive. I realized that when Q hooked up the CD ROM, he put that on the primary bus and the hard drive on the secondary bus. I thought maybe that was causing the issue, so I reversed them. Still, it didn't find the drive. I poked in the BIOS for a bit trying to figure out what the problem was. I had to upgrade the BIOS on the board anyways for it to recognize the dual GigE ports, so I did that (which was fun trying to find a DOS boot disk to do it from!).

I finally did get the hard disk to work, and it turns out it was a jumper on the disk -- it was set to "Master with slave present" and did not have a slave device on the bus. So, I removed the jumper and vwalla, it booted again. I am running Fedora Core 2 x86_64 with the latest kernel (so that it will use the forcedeth driver for the nforce gige ports).

So, tomorrow I should be getting in the PCI Express Infiniband card to play with. That should be interesting.

(2004-09-08 17:19:38.0) Permalink Comments [4]