Sebastien Boving wrote:
I downloaded the latest dm package from RH themselves, yet seem to be unable to apply the patchset to the vanilla RHES3 2.4.21EL-smp kernel. It seems that most of this is already in the kernel, or some previous versions of it, yet the device-mapper option does not figure in the 'make menuconfig' or 'make config' (not in mm/Config).
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Anyone went through this before? To complicate matters, this is a x86_64 box, probably not related but thought i should mention is.
I've done it before (on an i686 RHEL3 with a base 2.4.21EL-smp kernel). It's not a pure 2.4.21 kernel by any means; it contains a lot of items that have been backported from the 2.6 kernel (some of which is a part of device-mapper). You can't really apply the patches out of the box. It can be made to work but you basically have to apply all the patches manually -- look at the individual files being modified/added from the 2.4.21 devmapper patch (and better yet, look at the files in the patches/common directory) and determine which changes have already been backported by RedHat and which haven't.
There are some manual modifications you'll have to make as well -- check the archives of this list for a few additional patches I posted a couple of months ago, or else figure them out yourself from the compile errors. :) If you're planning on installing EVMS you'll have to do even more tweaking to get those patches to work as well, but with enough effort it *is* possible to get the kernel to compile and the tools to work properly (as best I can tell, although I gave up on EVMS and decided to stick with LVM2 instead).
Finally, note that patching your kernel in this way to use the latest device-mapper (and LVM2 or EVMS) source voids any service contract you may have with RedHat, which basically means they're not obligated to help you if you run into trouble (although I'm sure the dm-devel list will do the best they can).
Good luck, Brian
