Building ATA RAID and SMP Support into Slackware 9

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."

Comments

Uhm...

[ciryon]

If you choose to run Slackware, wouldn't you know how to do this?

There are so many people that wanna run Linux and heard that slack is the coolest and most "pro" way to do it. Sickens me. :-P

Ciryon

Why Slackware

[MBCook]

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.

Generic HOWTO would have sufficed?

[Lefty2446]

As I see it there is nothing drastically different with Slack to require a Slack specific HOWTO.

This only complicates things more.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO.html

Would have sufficed,

Adrian

Its not a joke

[Mohammed Al-Sahaf]

They really do not exist! Our valiant troops destroyed SMP support along with hundreds of the American criminals. Today alone we destroyed over 500 American tanks and over 40 of the evil zionist kernel modules.

HOW WILL LINUX EVER BE A CONSUMER OS. . .

[Fritz Benwalla]

. . . if my Mom has to recompile the kernel just to get symmetric multiprocessing support and a working ATA raid array for chrissake??!!!

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Use Slackware's kernel source package.

[volkerdi]

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.

mistake, imho

[doodleboy]

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.

and the traditional /usr/src/linux symlink mistake

[mister_jpeg]

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

from the department of redundancy department

[Erpo]

This HOWTO will describe the steps necessary to build support into Slackware Linux 9.0 for [...] RAID redundant drive array.

...or even a RAID redundant independent drive array, or a RAID redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) drives (or disks). Hey, that's getting a little long...maybe an acronym would be useful here. How about: RAID RAID!

Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.