[YBA] Linux on Intel R1000GZ

[Michael Vasiliev]

For any distribution, I would suggest you not rely on the installer to do any 
kind of helpful work on your part when it comes to new or exotic hardware. I 
have a few years of experience making RAID cards work and it practically 
always requires manual intervention. Be it to make the array bootable or marry 
the working configuration with the update scripts. It always requires deep 
understanding of which driver operates your card, which firmware is loaded and 
by which script, and what the package post and preinstall scripts will do when 
said package is upgraded. The best advice I can give is once it works, be sure 
to backup the entire bootchain, the kernel drivers, startup scripts, firmware 
and fw loading scripts, everything. Not once the update would make the system 
unbootable or arrays inavailable.

As for initial startup, I usually go with booting just about any LifeCD that 
is able to detect the RAID, then unpack the basic set of the desired distro's 
packages manually into a root directory, then start working on boot sequence, 
taking notes in the process. It's somewhat more time-consuming, but the 
advantage is a steady pace of progress towards a working setup, as opposed to 
taking pot shots in the dark, trying different distros and versions and hoping 
for a lucky break. If a distro or LiveCD works, take notes of kernel, drivers 
and RAID configuration, version numbers and loading mechanism, then recreate 
the same with the distro you want. Distros shipping bad/buggy firmware is 
definately not something unheard of.

On Monday 25 February 2013 07:49:51 Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
> Hi Linux-IL colleagues,
> Last night I installed CentOS 6.3 on an Intel R1000GZ server.
> 
> My intent at first was to install Debian Wheezy, but I was unable to find
> information on drivers for Debian that support either the RSTe or ESRT2
> (LSI) configuration of the RAID card.
> 
> So after giving up on Wheezy I tried to install Ubuntu 12.04 desktop. This
> distribution detected the RAID in RSTe configuration, but apparently not
> correctly since at the end of the installation it was unable to install
> grub anywhere.
> 
> It seems that Intel only supports RHEL and Oracle Linux on the R1000GZ
> servers, so my third option, which succeeded, was to install CentOS 6.3
> with the BIOS RAID in RSTe configuration.
> 
> The reasoning behind not trying harder to find a solution for Wheezy
> is that by using a base OS that supports the board OOTB I will have a
> better chance of getting automated notification of updates for the RSTe
> drivers and any other proprietary drivers without manual searching. In any
> event, I only intend to use the CentOS as a host OS for other mostly
> Debian-based OS's. Is this reasoning sound, or am I a wimp for giving up
> on Wheezy? In general, would installing the base OS that best fits the
> board regardless of other (mostly ideological) considerations be the best
> advice to customers, considering the support implications? (I am assuming
> that selecting the board for the OS is not, in general, an option.)
> 
> Purim Sameah,
> 
>   - yba