In the 7.1 installer, the aic7xxx driver needs to be loaded prior to the qla2x00, or the system won't install properly on systems connected to Fibre Storage. Worse, if no storage is connected, and the system is installed, the system will no longer boot after fibre strorage is attached because the system can then no longer find /.
*** Bug 36578 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
There appear to be two different issues here: 1) The installer loads the kernel modules in a bad order, causing drivers on the aic7xxx card to be shadowed during the install process. 2) If you have a working system with a aic7xxxx card, then go and add the qla2x00 later, kudzu discovers the qla2x00 on the next bootup and causes the drivers on the aic7xxx card to disappear? Is this correct?
Number (1) is the issue that I am concerned with at this time. I have not tested for number (2), although I can test this out later. I know that this isn't something that can be fixed right away, so I think this needs to be turned into an RFE in the installer. The workaround (for now) is "expert noprobe", and manually specifybng the drivers. Our SAN folks think this is too complicated for the new user. What I would like to see is: 1) Separate detection of drivers from actually loading driver. 2) Installer switch that lets the user pick from the list of _detected_ devices and put them in the correct load order. Similar to the following: Boot: linux expert ... ... Red Hat Installer: I detected the following devices in your system. Please select the drivers you would like to load, and use CTRL-(ARROW) to place them in the correct load order. [ ] Adaptec ... AIC7xxx [ ] Qlogic Fibre ... qla2x00 [ ] Intel EEPRO100 ... eepro100
I'm marking this as an RFE.
*** Bug 44567 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I've talked with the other developers and the situation is that the installer scans the PCI bus in ascending order, and it uses the first controller it finds as the default controller to install to. You might try setting the bus order of the controllers in the BIOS.