Re: which distrib for SATA installation
sam1967_at_hetnet.nl
Date: 01/13/05
- Next message: Peter Köhlmann: "Re: Linux Thieves Breaking The Law?"
- Previous message: J.O. Aho: "Re: transcode and mplex"
- In reply to: ta9ada: "which distrib for SATA installation"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:01:30 +0000
On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 07:26:49 +0100, ta9ada <ta9ada@laposte.net> wrote:
>hello
>
>i ve got a litlle problem to install linux on my computer
>i ve got 2 hdd, one SATA the 2nd normal, i d like to install a linux
>distribution on the SATA HDD
>
>if someone could tell me witch distrib is comatible ofr SATA Installation
I know you want real word advice from people with experience
installing SATA on Linux but maybe this article will be of some use.
http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
Problem: Serial ATA (also known as S-ATA or SATA) chipsets are rapidly
replacing legacy "parallel ATA" (PATA, i.e., regular ATA/133) chipsets
— but many Linux installers' kernels don't yet support many Serial ATA
chipsets. If yours isn't supported, you have an installation obstacle.
SuSE's, Fedora Core 2's, Gentoo's, Knoppix's, Debian-sarge release
candidates, and Mandrakelinux's installation kernels have a good
selection of the required drivers. Scott Kveton's Debian netinst image
does, likewise — see Links/Resources.
Note: There is no such thing as a distribution or its installer
(generically) "having SATA support" (or not). Please send anyone
speaking in such terms to this page. (Some SATA chipsets have been
supported since practically forever, as their programming interfaces
are unchanged from PATA predecessors. Others are brand-new and require
new drivers from scratch.)
There are three workaround options:
1. Switch the motherboard BIOS back to "legacy ATA mode" (parallel ATA
= PATA). Complete a Linux installation. Fetch or build a kernel with
support for your chipset. Switch the BIOS setting back. (Potential
catch: It's claimed that Dell Optiplex GX270 and Dell Precision
Workstation 360 desktop units, using Intel ICH5 SATA chipsets, don't
support switching to legacy ATA mode. This might be true of some
others.)
2. Rebuild your installer using 2.4.27, which includes libata, which
is desirable since it adds many new chipsets and gives a (potential,
subject to physical read limits, etc.) ~10M/s speed boost to some
others compared to the quite slow 2.4.x drivers/ide set.
3. Temporarily add a regular PATA drive to your system. Install Linux
onto that. Fetch or build a kernel with support for your chipset.
Migrate your system to the SATA drives.
Driver Overview: Linux kernels have two ATA ("IDE") driver sets:
*
"drivers/ide": This is the traditional ATA driver set,
maintained by Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz (before that, Andre Hedrick).
Contrary to popular belief, it includes low-level drivers for many
common SATA chipsets.
Optionally, on top of drivers/ide block-device (generic mass
storage access) drivers, one can load drivers to provide
software-level suport for BIOS services enabling various types of
manufacturer-specific software RAID (called "fakeraid", below):
o
For 2.4 kernels, Linux's software-RAID (fakeraid) driver
collection is called "ataraid", which has subdrivers for the various
manufacturers' different software RAID schemes. Using ataraid results
in your partitions being addressed using a /dev/ataraid/d0p1 (etc.)
device-naming convention. Note: Support greatly improved circa-2.4.23.
o
For 2.6 kernels, Linux's software-RAID (fakeraid) driver
collection is called "dmraid" (Device Mapper RAID). So far (Sept
2004), Promise Fasttrack, Highpoint 37X, Intel ICH5/6, LSI, and SiI
3112A/Medley are supported:
http://tienstra4.flatnet.tudelft.nl/~gerte/gen2dmraid/
I'm pretty sure manufacturers' proprietary drivers, where
available, are designed to fit the above framework.
*
"libata": This is the newer ATA driver set for selected SATA
chipsets only, maintained by Jeff Garzik, leveraging the kernel's
well-tested SCSI layer. Garzik developed it in the 2.6 kernel series.
2.4 support was available only with a backported patch until libata's
inclusion in 2.4.27.
libata causes each SATA port appear as a new SCSI bus. There are
individual low-level drivers for the individual SATA chipsets, e.g.,
ata_piix, sata_promise, sata_sil, sata_sx4, sata_svw, sata_via,
sata_vsc.
Hardware RAID cards have drivers outside these two collections (e.g.,
3w-xxxx, 3w-9xxx, aacraid, cciss, dac960, dpt_i2o, gdth, ips,
megaraid, megaraid2, mpt*).
- Next message: Peter Köhlmann: "Re: Linux Thieves Breaking The Law?"
- Previous message: J.O. Aho: "Re: transcode and mplex"
- In reply to: ta9ada: "which distrib for SATA installation"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Relevant Pages
|
