Description of problem: Please help Areca SAS/SATA-RAID driver backport to RHEL4.
This bug is dependent on "Bugzilla Bug 233056: Add support for Areca RAID controllers (include arcmsr driver from 2.6.19) " Please refer to it. Thanks,
Bug 205897 is also dependent on this bug, since RHEL 5.1 is slated to be in development before RHEL 4.6.
Backporting this driver to the 2.6.9 kernel may require some significant effort. There will also be on-going support costs for this in RHEL 4. I do not believe we currently have the business case to justify that cost and effort. Customers who want to run this adapter will be able to move to RHEL 5 to get support for it.
Tom Actually we still have a lot of customers whom got business on NAS system that is based on kernel 2.6.9-xx. It will cost them a lot of time if moving to latter kernel version. I still not hear they would invest in that. The request for the driver disk still remains. Sincerely hope Redhat could take it into consideration.
Customers (i.e. us) really would like this (see e.g. our IT#79615) even on RHEL4. Please consider reopening.
RHEL4 still has about 5 years of life (based on the 7 year lifespan for each version of RHEL, right?) so adding it to the release kernel in future RHEL4 updates would really simplify the lives of many sysadmins who have to manually compile and add the module each time the kernel is updated. I would also like to ask you to reconsider adding it to a future RHEL4 update.
Nick, Can you confirm if the patch for RHEL4 would be identical to the one you submitted for RHEL5? I believe the driver code is the same, so there would not be any extra effort needed to maintain two separate patches, but I have not studied the complete source code for the areca driver, I still believe it is very similar if not identical. Is anyone from Red Hat considering looking at reopening this request?
Diego, They are very similar, but a little bit diffenert. I will make time to build the patch these days.
Created attachment 154890 [details] The patch for Areca driver, arcmsr-1.20.00.13, in RHEL4
Hi Tom, Are there anybody in charge of this project? Actually there are still a lot of customers running on RHEL4.
Okay, okay... I see there is plenty of interest in this for RHEL 4. I will re-open this, and we will attempt to get it done in 4.6. If there are any glitches whatsoever, in either 5.1 or 4.6, then we may need to defer this until after 4.6.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Product Management has requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed products. This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update release.
Nick, please could you specify on which RHEL architectures Areca has tested and will support this driver ? I expect that as for 5.1 it will be the x86_64, i686 and PowerPC. Tomas
Yes, It is the same with the driver in RHEL5, i.e. x86_64、i686、Sparc、Sparc64、PowerPC.
Hi. I had test the arcmsr.1.20.0X.13 ,arcmsr.1.20.0X.14 on "RHEL 4 update 4, update 5, x86_64) with SMP kernel, 4GB memory or more, onn Intel XEN platform with EM64T and Hyper-Threading. Looping with CLI V1.72.250_70306 or the API call to ArcLib(Arclib_Build250_70306) will cause memory exhausted and unload the arcmsr module would NOT free the memory had been "used". Hank from Areca Inc. had confirmed that, and he said: "the problem was gone when using the kernel 2.6.18 even the memory size > 4G and intel platform". And he "guess this may the bug of kernel of 2.6.9 on intel platform". But I think that would be some bugs in arcmsr.1.20.0X.13 or arcmsr.1.20.0X.14. SO where are the bugs? The Makefile for compiling outside the kernel source tree hand been tested: ========================================== obj-m := arcmsr.o KDIR := /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build PWD := $(shell pwd) default: $(MAKE) -C $(KDIR) SUBDIRS=$(PWD) modules ==========================================
The problem will not happen on AMD platform. RHEL 4 update 4, update 5 SMP with 8GB memory had been done and the problem did NOT come up.
Nick, please take a look at the memory error. Thanks Tomas
Yes, we have post a patch to the customer. Actually it doesn't come up in the version that we post to RedHat.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Kernel Team for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release, and has moved to bugzilla status POST.
Hi guys, I heard RH complains Areca delays the process. Is it true? If yes, please let me know where.
Nick - Can you be more specific? AFAIK, there are no items waiting on Areca until the driver is added to RHEL 4.6.
An important customer in Euro stated that a PM in RH argued Areca slowd the certification process. I thought the process came along quite well and I am bewildered by the compliant. Therefore I have to inquire the reason why it happened. I will pass your message to our customer. Thanks,
Nick, if you have the name of the Red Hatter you can pass on to me, that would be great. I am also bewildered as well, since there is no official "certification" per se on hardware devices or peripherals. This is the first I've heard of any dissatisfaction on the current strides to include the Areca driver after formalizing the relationship. Obviously there has been some clamoring to have the driver included in RHEL, but it was only included into Fedora recently.
Nick, I haven't heard about this, and as for me I'm not complaining.
committed in stream U6 build 55.26. A test kernel with this patch is available from http://people.redhat.com/~jbaron/rhel4/
A fix for this issue should have been included in the packages contained in the RHEL4.6 Beta released on RHN (also available at partners.redhat.com). Requested action: Please verify that your issue is fixed to ensure that it is included in this update release. After you (Red Hat Partner) have verified that this issue has been addressed, please perform the following: 1) Change the *status* of this bug to VERIFIED. 2) Add *keyword* of PartnerVerified (leaving the existing keywords unmodified) If this issue is not fixed, please add a comment describing the most recent symptoms of the problem you are having and change the status of the bug to FAILS_QA. If you cannot access bugzilla, please reply with a message to Issue Tracker and I will change the status for you. If you need assistance accessing ftp://partners.redhat.com, please contact your Partner Manager.
A fix for this issue should have been included in the packages contained in the RHEL4.6-Snapshot1 on partners.redhat.com. Requested action: Please verify that your issue is fixed to ensure that it is included in this update release. After you (Red Hat Partner) have verified that this issue has been addressed, please perform the following: 1) Change the *status* of this bug to VERIFIED. 2) Add *keyword* of PartnerVerified (leaving the existing keywords unmodified) If this issue is not fixed, please add a comment describing the most recent symptoms of the problem you are having and change the status of the bug to FAILS_QA. If you cannot access bugzilla, please reply with a message about your test results to Issue Tracker. If you need assistance accessing ftp://partners.redhat.com, please contact your Partner Manager.
John, I cann't get access to the RHEL4 Update 6 x86_64 Beta disk4 from last week. But there are no problem with other disks I retried it for many many times but it always repried with no cache on my FlashGet. Would you please check it out?
Nick - did you try the most recent snapshot released today?
Were you attempting to download the Snapshot 1 images? And which variant specifically (AS, ES, WS, Desktop) are you seeing problems with?
I have downloaded the ISO from ftp://partners.redhat.com/797f57b13f1626c5e26da50bd1f52300/, which Andrius give it to me today. I will test ES variant next Monday.
We have tested ES x86_64 version yesterday. It looks good so far.
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2007-0791.html