SUCCESS! SuSE9 x86_64 & 2.6.1-mm4 on Tyan 2885 & Sil3114
This evening I was FINALLY successful at getting SuSE9 x86_64 fully installed and running on a Tyan S2885 (K8W) motherboard using the on-board Sil3114 SATA controller with two Seagate 72Gb drives hung off of them. I was able to install directly to the SATA drives without using any intermediate IDE or SCSI drives or controllers. The process was rather involved but now it is running a 2.6.1-mm4 kernel with the siimage driver that is part of the 2.6.1-mm4 kernel code tree. Unfortunately the closed source driver available from the ftp.tyan.com site for SuSE 9.0 x86_64 won't provide a bootable system but using the boot iso and the floppy image file from the tyan site gets you installed and to a shell prompt so you can pull down the 2.6.1 kernel source and Andrew Morton's mm4 patch for that 2.6.1 kernel. Then next is compiling a custom 2.6.1-mm4 kernel to get the system completely bootable. The closed source driver on Tyan's ftp site is compiled for a 2.4.21-102 kernel but the 9.0 X86_64 stuff released on the SuSE ftp sites (and mirrors) is built around 2.4.21-149 so once the system is installed the Tyan Sil6514.0 module won't actually load at a normal boot up. You can however use the boot.iso to boot and then stuck the floppy in prior to the kernel fully coming up. It will force load the module (something I couldn't figure out how to do in the context of the initrd part of a regular boot up) and then let you do the install and boot to a shell prompt afterwards to build a 2.6 kernel with the siimage community open source driver in it. One thing though, the closed source driver sees the controller and disks as SCSI devices (/dev/sda in my case) but the open source siimage driver sees them as IDE devices. So once you build and install your new 2.6.1-mm4 kernel prior to rebooting into it you have to change all the instances of sda (or whatever scsi disk it is seeing) in the fstab and lilo.conf file to the appropriate hd device (/dev/hde in our case). WARNING: DO NOT RUN the Setup_9.0 or SMP_Setup_9.0 outlined in step 3.4c of their directions without backing up your ORIGINAL lilo.conf FIRST! Very important as their scripts overwrite the original with a completely new fresh copy that is NOT based on the original created during the SuSE install process. Since their scripts and modules are built around a 2.4.21-102 kernel the lilo.conf file will not even work for a system that is 2.4.21-149 plus the root partition they specify in their lilo.conf file is probably not the same as what your install may be built around. -- Steven A. DuChene linux-clusters@mindspring.com sduchene@mindspring.com
Hi, We're trying to get the mm4 patch to apply to the 2.6.1 kernel source to get our Tyan SATA working but we can't get the patch to apply cleanly. We've tried both the vanilla 2.6.1 source as well as the kraxel source from Suse. Which source did you use and did you get any patching errors? If so how did you work around them? TIA, Al Steven A. DuChene wrote:
This evening I was FINALLY successful at getting SuSE9 x86_64 fully installed and running on a Tyan S2885 (K8W) motherboard using the on-board Sil3114 SATA controller with two Seagate 72Gb drives hung off of them. I was able to install directly to the SATA drives without using any intermediate IDE or SCSI drives or controllers. The process was rather involved but now it is running a 2.6.1-mm4 kernel with the siimage driver that is part of the 2.6.1-mm4 kernel code tree. Unfortunately the closed source driver available from the ftp.tyan.com site for SuSE 9.0 x86_64 won't provide a bootable system but using the boot iso and the floppy image file from the tyan site gets you installed and to a shell prompt so you can pull down the 2.6.1 kernel source and Andrew Morton's mm4 patch for that 2.6.1 kernel. Then next is compiling a custom 2.6.1-mm4 kernel to get the system completely bootable.
The closed source driver on Tyan's ftp site is compiled for a 2.4.21-102 kernel but the 9.0 X86_64 stuff released on the SuSE ftp sites (and mirrors) is built around 2.4.21-149 so once the system is installed the Tyan Sil6514.0 module won't actually load at a normal boot up. You can however use the boot.iso to boot and then stuck the floppy in prior to the kernel fully coming up. It will force load the module (something I couldn't figure out how to do in the context of the initrd part of a regular boot up) and then let you do the install and boot to a shell prompt afterwards to build a 2.6 kernel with the siimage community open source driver in it. One thing though, the closed source driver sees the controller and disks as SCSI devices (/dev/sda in my case) but the open source siimage driver sees them as IDE devices. So once you build and install your new 2.6.1-mm4 kernel prior to rebooting into it you have to change all the instances of sda (or whatever scsi disk it is seeing) in the fstab and lilo.conf file to the appropriate hd device (/dev/hde in our case).
WARNING: DO NOT RUN the Setup_9.0 or SMP_Setup_9.0 outlined in step 3.4c of their directions without backing up your ORIGINAL lilo.conf FIRST! Very important as their scripts overwrite the original with a completely new fresh copy that is NOT based on the original created during the SuSE install process. Since their scripts and modules are built around a 2.4.21-102 kernel the lilo.conf file will not even work for a system that is 2.4.21-149 plus the root partition they specify in their lilo.conf file is probably not the same as what your install may be built around.
participants (2)
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Al Adler -
Steven A. DuChene