I've been struggling for months trying to get FC3/FC4 working on an Abit
SU-2S with a Marvell 88SX-6081 SATA-II controller...When the drives are
under high load, they go offline and never come back...This bug is noted in
Marvell's 3.40 driver, but I am unable to get anything newer...I've gone as
far as to sign a NDA with Marvell, and they still won't let me on their
extranet to get the driver...
Unfortunately, ABIT (who should really be the ones supporting this issue)
has disavowed any knowledge of this motherboard and has apparently
discontinued their entire server line for now...
As it stands now, I'm stuck with a kick ass $500 motherboard that looks
great on paper (although I was seeing 1,800 megs/sec cached and 120 megs/sec
off of the drives before they crashed)! If anyone has any Marvell
connections, I would certainly appreciate whatever you can do...
Anyway, on a side note, if anyone runs in to an installation problem where
formatting the drives in software RAID-0 dies every time, I found that
manually formatting it this way got me past that point (presumably because
the controller saw less load for whatever reason, but it's probably a touch
more optimized than the format that is passed from Anaconda - I've probably
done about 30-40 failed installs before I came up with this, so maybe it
will help someone):
mdadm --create -l 0 -n 2 -c 256 /dev/(sdX) /dev/(sdX)
mke2fs /dev/(mdX) -i 32768 -j -m 1 -R stride=64
Also some more information for people searching in the future, a good site
for manually compiling the Marvell driver is here:
http://www.keffective.com/mvsata/
After I did that, I still had to break out of the install and do the
following:
mknod /dev/hda b 3 0 (assuming a cdrom drive)
mkdir /mnt/cd
mount /dev/hda /mnt/cd
modprobe /mnt/cd/mv_sata.ko
umount /mnt/cd
One other tiny bit of useful info that I found is that putting the swap file
on the drives separately (not in a RAID) will still allow the kernel to
stripe it on its own, as long as the priority is the same in fstab, which
would look something like this:
/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults,pri=1 0 0
/dev/sdb2 swap swap defaults,pri=1 0 0