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What Happened to ABIT's Gentus Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the did-management-backpeddal dept.

Evangelion asks: "Earlier this year, Slashdot reported on ABit's own Linux Distro, Gentus Linux (and thier subsequent violation of the GPL). Well, whatever happened to them? Thier website seems to be non-existent at the moment. I'm asking as I've found myself in a rather irritating situation: as a recent purchaser of ABit's fine KT7-RAID motherboard, I have discovered that the IDE RAID controller on it isn't well supported in Linux, in that it can't actually do RAID, only single drives. How this relates to Gentus Linux is that it was supposed to support IDE RAID with the HPT370, and it was the only distro to actually do so. Does anyone know of any confirmation or denial to this? What happened to Gentus Linux? Did it get canned after the GPL issues? More to the point, is there any way I can get my RAID controller working in Linux?"

11 comments

  1. Re:no GPL and no RAID by Evangelion · · Score: 1

    and if Andre Hedrick (the Linux IDE guy), a.k.a. the Donald Becker of IDE chipsets, can't get it to work, I doubt ABit could just "support" the HPT370. Incidentally, the HPT368 also does "RAID", in the same sense.

    I was simply going on heresay from mailing lists that turned up on google when I thought that Gentus supported the 370 - I had no real proof one way or the other.


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  2. 3ware does hardware RAID (with linux support!) by cymen · · Score: 1

    Check out 3ware (http://www.3ware.com). They have RAID cards that are hardware based. We use them at work for mirroring. Good stuff...

  3. Re:no GPL and no RAID by ]ix[ · · Score: 1

    Just for the record I have an abit BP6 with no such problems. But SMP is always a bit "flaky" no matter what board yore using.

    /ix

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  4. flaky? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1

    My BP6 has been the most stable piece of hardware ever, nearly as stable as a sparc2. NT or FreeBSD has never ever crashed. The only time NT did bluescreen was when I did some serious overclocking (pushing a C333 to 540mhz) and when I had a buggy permedia2 card.

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  5. Find Gentus here by yamla · · Score: 1
    Does the HP370 actually do hardware RAID? I know several cards on the market don't really, they require software to do it. Kind of a bummer. I don't know about the HP370, though.

    You can find Gentus Linux by going to the BP6 web site. However, you probably knew that, and probably knew it would not work. Try posting to the message boards on the Bp6 site, I'm sure someone will have a copy for you.

    I really like the Abit motherboards. I currently run the BP6 with two celerons. I'm not sure I would go for an 'experiemental' motherboard in the future, though.

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    1. Re:Find Gentus here by shippo · · Score: 2
      So they're the RAID controller equivalent of Winmodems, software-wavetable soundcards and other worthless junk.

      In other words cheaply produced hardware relying upon CPU resources to perform the same functionality as more expensive 100% hardware solutions.

    2. Re:Find Gentus here by Evangelion · · Score: 3


      I'm pretty sure that it's a pseudo-hardware RAID solution - the bios on the controller looks to take care of the creation and management of the arrays, but that you need software (in the form of drivers) to communicate with it, and that software has to know something about RAID apparently.

      Blah. Disappointing, to say the least. If I didn't need to run 3 operating systems, I'd have gone for a software RAID soloution anyway.

      (Note that regarding the 'experimental' nature of the ABIT boards, I picked up the KT7-RAID because a) I needed a good Socket A mobo, and the KT7 looked like the best out there (roughly equivilant to ASUS offerings, in other words), and b) I decided that on the off chance I get an ATA100 drive, the $20 more for the ATA100/RAID controller would be worth it - and since I did end up getting two ATA100 drives, well, it was)

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  6. Re:no GPL and no RAID by compwizrd · · Score: 1

    have to hunt down what i'm running then. It had the mb for months, before i gave up on trying to fix it, and stuck the promise board in. thanks

  7. mirror by ]ix[ · · Score: 2

    Get your Gentus here:

    ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Linux/mirror s/g entus/

    /ix

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  8. no GPL and no RAID by Gothmolly · · Score: 2
    They got a lot of heat for the non-GPL stuff they tried to pull. Also, the Promise RAID cards arent supported under Linux as "RAID" cards.... and if Andre Hedrick (the Linux IDE guy), a.k.a. the Donald Becker of IDE chipsets, can't get it to work, I doubt ABit could just "support" the HPT370. Incidentally, the HPT368 also does "RAID", in the same sense.

    ABit caught a lot of flak for their dual Celeron board, the BP6, and its instability (at rated clock speeds) under Linux.

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    1. Re:no GPL and no RAID by compwizrd · · Score: 2

      And under NT too. I ended up putting a promise ultra/33 card in, so i could disable that HPT366 piece of shit. Installed CpuIdle Pro, and finally, put a heatsink and fan on the chipset, it's reasonably stable now. Usually manage 2-3 months of uptime under NT.

      Till i figured out the hpt366 was buggy, and the heat issue, it crashed every couple weeks :/