Re: [gentoo-user] initrd and raid

[Mike Williams]

On Sunday 21 August 2005 20:29, David Busby wrote:
> List,
>    I've got a Super Micro P4SCT+ that uses the Marvell SATA controller that
> Linux doesn't know out-of-the-box.  There was the mv_sata module provided
> by ABit that I found, and it compiles and loads into my 2.6.12 kernel.  I
> can see the drives and have made a raid out of them no problem.  I'm
> currently booting off the Intel SATA in the machine from /dev/sda  The
> other drives are /dev/sdb,c,d.  OK, so what I want to do is this:  Remove
> the current /dev/sda and bump the /dev/sdb,c,d each up by one and then boot
> of them.  /dev/sdb1,c1,d1 are set as RAID0+hotspare and configured/grub-ed
> etc.  What I can't do is get the initrd to work.  I've added the module and
> can see when it boots that it finds those devices but then it looks like it
> cannot see my devices.  I get a Kernel Panic not init found, then it says
> to try passing init= to the kernel.  I don't understand that, what must I
> do?  I'm using udev so perhaps when the kernel is booting it cannot see my
> devices in /dev ?

I've got one of those controllers, on a Supermicro PCI card.
I boot from other drives, so don't have any initrd stuff. I do still have a 
problem with it though.
That problem is that once the module is loaded, it takes several seconds to 
actually find, and register those drives, before they are available for use. 
So long in fact that if I load it, then 3 raid modules automatically during 
start up, by the time mdadm gets run the drives still aren't there!
I simple modified the modules init script to put a 1 second pause between each 
modprobe.
Perhaps a similar pause after loading the module in your initrd would help.

-- 
Mike Williams
-- 
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