Arch Linux

halmcelroy

Member

Registered: 2005-05-09

Posts: 15

RAID Support

I was wondering what kind of RAID and SCSI support does Arch have?.. I have some Dell Poweredge Servers at work, which currently run RH9. I was gonna recommend Arch, but wanted to know what support it had for these.

Thanks
Hal

FUBAR

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2004-12-08

Posts: 1,029

Website

Re: RAID Support

I'm running Arch (i586) on my Compaq ProLiant with a SMART 2/P RAID. The support for it is right in the kernel!

So if your RAID-controller is supported by the kernel, Linux will recognize the arrays you created on it and you can use them like any other disk or partition.

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A bus station is where a bus stops.
A train station is where a train stops.
On my desk I have a workstation.

Duke

Member

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-06-22

Posts: 41

Re: RAID Support

I'm booting off a scsi drive and Arch works perfectly.  Although I did run into a few problems during install.

During install, Arch uses devfs and the drives use the devfs naming scheme.  Which is a problem for me since I boot off a scsi drive, use udev usually and also have ide drives.  Since ide drives are listed first with devfs, arch always wanted grub to be installed on one of the ide drives, and not the scsi drive.  I simply removed the ide drives during install and changed all the config files to use the udev naming scheme before rebooting.

I don't know why there are seperate kernels for ide and scsi systems (maybe it's to keep the size of the ide only kernels down?), but aside from those slight bumps during the install, Arch works flawlessly with scsi systems.

As for RAID, can't help you there, I just use software RAID...

FUBAR

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2004-12-08

Posts: 1,029

Website

Re: RAID Support

You're probably trying to install it to a Promise or a HighPoint RAID-controller. All you need to do is to load the appropriate module for the RAID-controller. Then the arrays you defined in the RAID-controller's BIOS are detected and created in /dev. When you've done that, you can partition the array with cfdisk and put a filesystem on it. After that, you can start installing Arch!

I've using Linux Software RAID (LSR, through md-devices) instead of the RAID-functionality of my onboard RAID-controller. With LSR it's possible to simply combine any two partitions (preferrably of the exact same size and on different IDE-controllers for speed) into one RAID 0/1/5/... drive and still get the RAID-advantages. I found this just as fast as using the onboard controller (since it doesn't have its own CPU).

I'm sure my post is too vague, so here's what you have to find out:
- brand and type of the RAID-controller
- appropriate kernel module for the RAID-controller
- are you going to setup RAID-arrays in the controller's BIOS or are you going to use LSR?

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A bus station is where a bus stops.
A train station is where a train stops.
On my desk I have a workstation.