LSI Logic MegaRAID I4 4CH ATA/100 RAID Controller?

[heffe2001]

I have a system I'm trying to set up (a mix of SATA & IDE drives, right now, 3 IDE, and 2 SATA).  I'm trying to use a LSI Logic MegaRAID i4 Raid controller, and the system sees it fine, but 4.3.3 apparently doesn't.  What I'm trying to do is basically create single 'stripes' with the raid controller, each drive on a seperate controller on the MegaRAID board, and add the Sata's on as well (I purchased the Plus license, so I'm covered there).

 

What I'm guessing is that the UnRaid kernel doesn't have support for this LSI board, so I'm wondering how hard it'd be to compile support in?  (I'm not a linux newbie, but I am a unraid newbie, guess I need to hit the wiki and see how to compile a UR kernel ).

 

[WeeboTech]

It's not that hard to compile a kernel and add the driver. (if supported well by the manufacturer).

 

The tricky part becomes extracting the initrootfs image, updating it, repacking it and sending it back to the flash drive.

I know there's a a good tutorial on the forum somewhere about recompiling the kernel.  Do a few searches and check the Wiki.

 

[heffe2001]

I need to try it when I get home, but apparently it might just be the firmware on the card making it not see it.  It's got the Dell CERC firmware (shows up as a dell card), at least on other linux distros, you need to load the LSI firmware on the card, and then it shows up fine (I'm guessing I'll still need to compile the kernel to add the megaraid drivers on the system).  At least loading the firmware from LSI will make it detectable by the kernel included with 4.3.3 (once the right modules are loaded).  Otherwise you need to make several source-code edits to get it working..

 

[heffe2001]

Took me a bit to get the dev system going (well, not really, just took a bit to get it to where it wasn't killing the dev systems boot configuration every time I made a new kernel), but it looks like I have a working kernel/bzroot image (need to transfer it to my live key and reboot the server yet though).  Wasn't too hard, and I could turn on other adapters and such as needed...

 

**EDIT**

 

Well, I'm part of the way there.  The drive is seen by the system (shows up as SDA), and the GUI for UnRAID sees it as well (although it ID's it as "pci-0000:01:0a:0-scsi-0:4:0:0 (sda) no id".  You can add it to the array, but when you go back to the Main page, it's not listed on the array.  Tried several times, but I'm manually modprobing the module after boot (I'll add it to the startup scripts and see if that makes any difference).

 

I did go so far as partition it, and create a FS on it, just to make sure the system can actually USE the drive, and that works perfectly fine.

 

The only thing I can figure, the I4 is being ID'ed as a SCSI controller, and it's currently in Mass Storage mode (going to try i2o when I get home, but I don't hold much hope on that working).  As far as I know, there is no non-raid firmware for this card either (which would be great, a 4 channel, 8 drive non-raid card would fit my system perfectly, could put my IDE drives one to a channel (I have 4), and my 2 SATA's and my plus license would be good to go .