Thanks everyone for their input (especially Dan who recruited Alex to my
cause off list). I feel a bit better about tackling this next week.
>>
> throw rotting fruit at whoever bought hardware that doesn't work with
> the intended OS?
:-) Yeah, this is tempting right now.
>
>> 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.
>
Diffing the modules.alias for an "updated" node yields a lot more cxgb4
lines then in the "normal" initrd - same for the other module. files.
You've hit on something with trying to update rather then add from
scratch. This goes with Alex's comments about adding to the initrd
rather then editing it.
>>
> Did you get the T5 firmware into it as well as the (updated) driver?
I might have missed the firmware, I had target fixation on the driver
and module files. Which is silly of me as to get thing to work
"normally" I need to install the firmware alongside the driver rpms.
>
> Other random thoughts -
> - Use the 1GB?
There's a lack of hardware problem with this one - we're currently
borrowing a couple of 1G switches in addition to our 10G ones to play
with. There's nothing to stop us installing things right now over the 1G
(in fact we have installed some machines for testing like this) - but
it'll be better if we started off properly!
> - 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.
>
Sadly not an option on the shared cluster - technically we didn't pay
for these!
Thanks again, have a good weekend all!
Matt
>>
> 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
>
|