SAS, Precision 690, SUSE 10.1: Solution

[Stefan von Dombrowski]

Hi,

in search of a solution for the problem of installing Suse 10.1 on a 
Dell Poweredge 690 with an LSI SAS Controller I've found that at least 
two others on this list have had similar problems:

1. Installation system correctly identifies the SAS controller and loads 
MPT Fusion drivers;
2. Only Drives configured for Raid are accessible, a single SAS Drive is 
recognized during boot and assigned to /dev/sda (listed 
in /sys/block/sda/), but /dev/sda is not accessible;

Well, after quite some experimenting we've found a solution to the 
problem: It seems that the MPT Fusion driver 3.03.07 as shipped with 
Suse 10.1 has a bug that was not present in the 3.02.x series.

On the LSI Logic website http://www.lsilogic.com under 'downloads' you 
will find a driver archive for the LSI SAS1068 (version 3.02.68). That 
archive includes sources and a driver update disk for Suse Enterprise 
Linux 9. Compile the driver for the Suse 10.1 installation kernel 
(2.6.16.13-4-default and 2.6.16.13-4-smp) and use these modules to 
build a driver update disk for Suse 10.1 based on the SLES 9 one.

With this update (downgrade) the installation of Suse 10.1 runs 
smoothly. But make sure before rebooting the system after initial 
installation that 'initrd' contains the MPT Fusion 
drivers! /mnt/etc/sysconfig/kernel:INITRD_MODULES="... mptbase ..."! If 
not, add mptbase to INITRD_MODULES and rebuild initrd with 'mkinitrd'.

On specific request, I could make the driver update disk image available 
via ftp.

Regards,

Stefan