Support for supermicro 7501 based boards and issues with 3ware raid cards

[Eric W. Biederman]

steven james <pyro at linuxlabs.com> writes:

> Greetings,
> 
> It may be possible to do something with ADLO to get the BIOS tools
> working. 
> 
> Something to watch out for will be the detection and initialization of an
> existing raid on boot. If BIOS on the card is doing that, it won't work in
> LinuxBIOS without an ADLO (or similar) solution.
> 
> I have delt with Promise fastraid under LinuxBIOS, but the best solution
> there was to mod the kernel driver to make it be a JBOD and use the Linux
> md driver for RAID.
> 
> Is the 3Ware genuine hardware RAID, or is it a softraid solution?

Generally what I have seen is that real hardware raid solutions are
not just x86 only, and they work under LinuxBIOS.  Because they do
not need the x86 BIOS.  

For IDE raid I have not heard that those are actually real hardware raid.

For an onboard controller even an ADLO type solution will be insufficient
because installing LinuxBIOS will kill the option Rom.

Basically it is a matter of getting it to work under Linux without
needing an option Rom.  And for scsi that has not been a problem.

Eric