From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Description of problem: When you build a driver diskette ( in my case, it is the ips driver diskette ) for x86_64, there are two kernels to include in modules.cgz , 2.4.21-15.EL and 2.4.21-15.ELsmp. Normally, during a RedHat Linux install, the booted kernel ( from CD 1 ) would load the 2.4.21-15.EL ( the uni-processor version ) driver to use during the install. From my investigations, it appears that the RHEL 3 Update 2 x86_64 CD is booting a kernel that was built for ia32e, not x86_64. 1.) If, for the 2.4.21-15.EL kernel, I use a driver that was built for ia32e, it loads fine and the install goes OK. However, the driver will fail for the installed uni-processor kernel ( after installation ), since it has installed a kernel appropriate for x86_64 and a driver that is for ia32e. 2.) If I put the right driver ( built for x86_64 ) on the diskette, it will fail loading during the Linux install and the driver diskette is completely ignored. I have built the driver diskettes ( for RHEL 3 Update 2 ) and tested successfully on intel boxes ( i686 kernels ) and 32 bit AMD ( athlon kernels ) and they are all fine. Only the x86_64 architecture CD's have this problem. This also appears to work for an ia32e server, since the same kernel used during install is what gets installed. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Simply attempt an install on an x86_64 box, using a disk driver update diskette 2. 3. Actual Results: If the driver diskette is using the correct x86_64 kernels, it will fail trying to lad the driver during install ( because it is not running an x86_64 kernel ) Expected Results: It should work like all the other architectures. Additional info: I can supply ips driver diskettes built both ways ( one with the proper uni-processor kernel and one with the ia32e kernel in modules.cgz ) if desired. That would require that you have a ServeRAID adapter. You do not need to be installing to drives on the ServRAID adapter to see this. If we offer a new ServeRAID adapter which requires an updated driver in order to work, you would be totally unable to install on a system with that adapter.
The boot kernel is the ia32e kernel since that works on both x86_64 and EM64T systems. To work with this and update a driver on the system, you want to use the slightly newer and better driver disk format that will let you put ia32e and x86_64 drivers in the same modules.cgz. The differences from a version 0 driver disk to a version 1 driver disk are: 1) Instead of having /rhdd-6.1, you have /rhdd 2) Instead of having module foo.o as $(uname -r)/foo.o, you have it as $(uname -r)/$arch/foo.o