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Building ATA RAID and SMP Support into Slackware 9

Posted by timothy on from the tomorrow's-computer-today dept.

TheMadPenguin writes "This HOWTO will describe the steps necessary to build support into Slackware Linux 9.0 for Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and a Promise Ultra ATA RAID redundant drive array. By default, there is no support for these configurations unless specified through a kernel recompilation after the initial install."

6 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Why Slackware by MBCook · · Score: 4, Informative
    Why is this Slackware specific. These instructions would work on most distros (with one or two small changes of where the boot kernel is kept). A better title would have been:

    Building ATA RAID and SMP Support into Your Kernel

    Those complaints asside, the guy knows what he's doing, so if you want to run RAID or SMP on your kernel, give it a read.

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  2. Use Slackware's kernel source package. by volkerdi · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's better to use Slackware's kernel-source-2.4.20-noarch-5.tgz package, since it already contains patches for some ext3 bugs as well as the recent ptrace exploit.

    If you do use the original 2.4.20 tarball in the source/k directory, you will need to apply the linux-2.4.20.ptrace.diff.gz that you'll find in the same directory, and if you use ext3, you'll also want to apply the patches from the ext3-patches directory.

  3. Re:Uhm... by Dogun · · Score: 2, Informative

    yeah... slack is a bit too hardcore for the masses. Going with an entry level distro is probably the way to go. Then, if you find that Redhat and Mandrake are your mortal enemies, give slack a try. That's the story of my life. :) Never been happier... though I hear Gentoo is tight...

  4. mistake, imho by doodleboy · · Score: 5, Informative
    article says: #> mv /lib/modules/2.4.20 /lib/modules/orig
    Bad bad bad. Now the original config is unbootable, a bad thing when you're monkeying around with the kernel. What you do is edit the kernel Makefile and add something to the extraversion parameter, i.e.:

    EXTRAVERSION = -smp_raid

    Then you'll have two entries under /lib/modules, 2.4.20 and 2.4.20-smp_raid. Make the appropriate entries in /etc/lilo.conf and you can boot either one. Disabling a stock, working kernel config is lunacy. Using extraversion is obviously the safer method, that's what it's for. This is all mentioned in the kernel HOWTO, iirc.
  5. and the traditional /usr/src/linux symlink mistake by mister_jpeg · · Score: 3, Informative

    Again, for the billionth time, folks, /usr/src/linux IS NOT supposed to be a symlink to the current kernel sources.
    /usr/src/linux SHOULD link to the kernel headers in place when glibc was compiled.

    Therefore you may safely have

    uname -r

    Linux 2.5.25

    /usr/src/linux-2.5.25
    /usr/src/linux-2.2.19
    /usr/src/linux->linux-2.2.19

    --
    -jpeg
  6. Re:Uhm... by BrokenHalo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Slackware is no longer the king of hard.It doesn't pretend to be. It just works; it's one of the simplest distros, ideal for tweakers. The init scripts make sense to "real" unix heads, and if you want to recompile anything (or everything) from scratch, it won't stand in your way like rpm or perhaps even deb based systems will. Basically, it just gives you a world to stand on while you do it.