[gentoo-server] Re: linux-2.6.8-gentoo-r3 .config for RAID5, help?

[David Wuertele]

Thanks to Chris Smart, I now have a bootable kernel!

The New Behavior:

  The kernel gets as far as mounting /dev/hda1 on /newroot, and it
  appears to raidstart /dev/md0, but /dev/md0 doesn't have a
  superblock.  When I looked around, I discovered that all the drives
  on my PCI IDE controller are not discovered.

  Since the LiveCD uses the siimage module, I tried compiling with
  CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SIIMAGE=y.  But after doing this, the problem is that
  my hda is not discovered properly.

  My guess was that the PCI IDE controller was somehow messing up the
  device order.  Since the LiveCD boot uses siimage as a module, I
  tried compiling the kernel with CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SIIMAGE=m.

  But now the kernel doesn't discover the PCI IDE controller's drives.
  The module isn't getting loaded.  When I typed "modprobe siimage;
  raidstart /dev/md0; mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0" everything worked fine.

The new problem:

  I generate initrd using "genkernel initrd".  The resulting initrd
  doesn't seem to be loading the siimage module during boot.

  When I compile the siimage driver in permanently (not as a module),
  the drive order gets messed up (that's just a HYPOTHESIS).

The new question:

  How can I get siimage to load early enough for raid to properly
  start, but late enough that it doesn't mess up the drive order?

Thanks,
Dave