> -----Original Message-----
> From: Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes [mailto:TB-
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Matt Doidge
>
> So the obvious choice is to
>
throw rotting fruit at whoever bought hardware that doesn't work with
the intended OS?
> hack the initial ramdisk to enable it to speak chelsio NIC.
>
Oh. You could do that too.
> Method 1: Hack the SL initrd.img! This involves unpacking the initrd.img
> (using unlzma and cpio), and manually inserting the drivers into the right
> places, whilst also editing modules.aliases and other modules.* files to
> contain the extra chelsio (cxgb4) information.
>
Hmm. What extra information? The standard kernel should have the cxgb4
driver in it. We didn't have any problems with ours, but I'm guessing
you've got the newer T5 versions, but I'd have thought you'd should be
looking at a process of updating the driver, not adding it from scratch.
> The information was pulled
> from a manually installed machine, then packing it all up again. Very
> messy! Surprisingly the initrd.img still worked after I tainted it, but it
> still failed to see the 10G nics.
>
Did you get the T5 firmware into it as well as the (updated) driver?
Other random thoughts -
- Use the 1GB?
- Wait for SL6.6. Looking at the RHEL release dates, you might not
have long to wait, and I think there's a decent chance that it'll
have an updated driver.
- Install RHEL7 and run all your compute inside vac VMs.
> Method 2: Build our own initrd.img! After our previous failures we tried
> to build our own boot files. On one of our manually installed machines we
> used dracut to build the ram disk image (making sure dracut-network was
> installed, otherwise it doesn't work at all). We then copied this image
> and the machines vmlinuz files to the usual PXE places.
>
Hmm. I'm not sure how the installer PXE images are built, but
I think they're a bit different to normal Dracut ones.
Ewan
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