hi out there, I just got myself a new motherboard (Soyo Dragon Raid Plus SY-K7V).
As a hopefully "useful" feature the board comes with this Promise FastTrak Raid Controller. Although not listed as officially supported hardware for LM8.1 I learned from various postings on various newsgroups and lists like this that the controller including its Raid functionality was actually supported by the most recent kernels. So I downloaded the most recent mdk-kernel sources (2.4.17). Surprizingly I found the following comments about my controller (and ataraid in general) in the kernel documentation: excpert from Configure.help ---------CUT---------- Support for IDE Raid controllers CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ATARAID Say Y or M if you have an IDE Raid controller and want linux to use its softwareraid feature. You must also select an appropriate for your board low-level driver below. Note, that Linux does not use the Raid implemetation in BIOS, and the main purpose for this feature is to retain compatibility and data integrity with other OS-es, using the same disk array. Linux has its own Raid drivers, which you should use if you need better performance. Support Promise software RAID (Fasttrak(tm)) CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ATARAID_PDC Say Y or M if you have a Promise Fasttrak (tm) Raid controller and want linux to use the softwareraid feature of this card. This driver uses /dev/ataraid/dXpY (X and Y numbers) as device names. If you choose to compile this as a module, the module will be called pdcraid.o. ---------CUT--------- So is it true that the FastTrak Raid controller is only a software-raid controller? Why would anybody use an extra controller for software raid if one can get Raid at better performance from the kernel? And if I remember it right, M$ products have built in software-raid features as well ... Anyway, I was still curious and wanted to give the controller a try. So I created the required devices under /dev/ataraid and insmod'ed ataraid.o and pdcraid.o into my system. But that only leads my to the same point every time: I get a nice kernel panic message from the module. Has anybody got this thing working unter any kernel version? Udo
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