On Thursday 10 January 2008 22:55 Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > On 10.01.2008 21:59, Martin Marcher wrote: >> Hello, >> >> hope to be in the right place to ask this, if not just point me to where >> you think it's apropriate >> >> my Hardware is: >> >> Tyan Transport GT20 (B2865) >> http://www.tyan.com/support_download_manuals.aspx?model=B.GT20B2865 >> >> an Areca 1210 raid controller is attached to it and I just was hit by the >> 2TB limit which a BIOS can handle. >> > > Is the RAID array exactly 2 TB? Then the BIOS will see its size as 0.
nope it's 3TB total. Running debian/etch we have seperate /boot / partitions and most of the space is used by some xen domUs. / is inside an LVM (guess that doesn't matter a lot since debian itself is ready for the large block device support) > Why should we replicate such a bug? If you use Linux as bootloader > inside LinuxBIOS and if the Linux kernel has support for devices >2 TB > enabled (all recent kernels do), you can boot from disks up to 65535 TB > (maybe even 131071 TB) if the adapter creates a virtual SATA device (the > limits are what you would expect from LBA48 addressing). Depending on > the device driver (you said the RAID adapter claims to be SCSI), the > limit may be even higher. the problem is I don't get to boot linux. Tried to boot from a cd with only grub on it but after some reading I concluded that grub relies on the disks reported from the bios. All grub finds is (cd) and fd0-9 - not a single hd device. > Three "solutions": > 1. Use LinuxBIOS and Linux as Bootloader (LAB) > 2. Use the vendor BIOS and boot from a smaller disk I do that right now, but I consider it a not optimal solution > 3. Use the vendor BIOS, but make sure the RAID is either smaller than 2 > TB or a few GB bigger than 2 TB (in that case the detected size would > probably be real size minus 2 TB). To be honest, this tip may or may not > work, depending on how broken the BIOS is. well it's not working since the disk is "stuck" at >2TB (750GB are used the rest is free, but the raid controller doesn't have an option to shrink it back) > >> 3) Last, not least I couldn't the Tyan GT20 in the supported hardware >> list, is that true or just missing. >> > > True. It should be supportable, though, if we have one board to > experiment with. The Tyan Tomcat K8E S2865 is the board inside according > to the manual. > >> If it's missing I'll bug Tyan about this once a month or so, in case you >> don't have the specs available to send it to you (if you want me to do >> that). > > How much time are you willing to invest to port LinuxBIOS to the board? If it was only me: as much as needed We are a small company with 2 physical server but given I could find a setup where I can install and uninstall linuxbios securely (in case it won't work) I guess I could talk my boss into allowing me to regularly taking the server down and test the bios - reading up on this in the wiki now /martin -- http://noneisyours.marcher.name http://feeds.feedburner.com/NoneIsYours You are not free to read this message, by doing so, you have violated my licence and are required to urinate publicly. Thank you. -- coreboot mailing list [email protected] http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
