SCSI Adapter installation

[norte3]

I have an Adaptec AHA2906 PCI SCSI
For Puppy 1.xx load the driver with: modprobe aic7xxx.o

For Puppy 2.01 how?

The same for bttv.o , tuner.o , etc.

Thanks

[Sage]

It doesn't work! Unix/Linux originated on scsi, but things have moved on. Many distros don't work with scsi now, although the kernel may detect it. I've been badgering Barry to activate the function in his installer, but he doesn't have scsi HW himself (or time, I suspect!). Apparently it's a matter of drivers, although he speculates that the reason DSL, the only one that seems to work with scsi readily, may have come up with some generic solution. Although I know nothing about SW, the more I use scsi, the more this seems to be their answer. Shame really, as there's a ton of excellent scsi kit to be had gratis out there from upgraded servers and scsi drives/buses are very very fast , long lived and very reliable. Perfect to raise Puppy to another level. Maybe one of the co-developers will take on this project?

[Flash]

As for the TV tuner card, yer on yer own. I can't remember the name of the project for getting them to work in Linux. I think it might be ivtv or something like that. There has been some discussion in the forum about TV tuner cards, in the Hardware forum I think.

[rcsteiner]

It doesn't work! Unix/Linux originated on scsi, but things have moved on. Many distros don't work with scsi now, although the kernel may detect it. I've been badgering Barry to activate the function in his installer, but he doesn't have scsi HW himself (or time, I suspect!).

I just took a serious look at Puppy after being a long-time Mandrake user, and the lack of SCSI support is a painful thing for me. I have five boxes on my home LAN (out of six) which are older and are prime juicy targets for a distro like Puppy (all PPro/200 boxes with between 96 and 256MB of RAM), but all of them are also using either Adaptec 2940U or 2940UW SCSI controllers.

At least most of the CD-ROM drives are IDE.

That's what I get for buying quality hardware (IBM IntelliStations. Compaq Deskpros, and a Micron tower). The hardware is outlasting Linux's ability to support it, which is something I'd never see.

The sad part is that it detects everything else. Sound cards, network cards, video, etc. Thankfully, Samba clientsupport (via LinNeighborhood) is so good that I can get at all of the other boxes on the LAN (Linux, Windows, and OS/2 boxes plux a Buffalo Linkstation), but I can't see my own local data. I have to grab it indirectly by grabbing this box's backup from the Buffalo LS.

[Sage]

Glad to know that there's some support for scsi out there. I had a few exchanges with Barry about this. DSL works perfectly with scsi. Barry wondered whether they had used some generic driver. My guess is that his guess is correct as DSL works on several of the clone cards that I've tested. I offered BK a couple of drives, but I'm short on cards and cabling. Maybe he can revisit this option? Don't think the penny has dropped about just how much super-fast, super quality, scsi junk is being dumped with old servers. Perfect for Puppy and, when space gets used up, can always add another disc to the chain.

[Jesse]

Hi,

I saw you chatting about scsi and I remembered that I had some very 'old' scsi kicking around the attic, and tried plugging it into my pc... I slightly modified my initrd to include the drivers and put a very simple load comand for them, tweaked the scsi scanning, and hey presto:



Even the PUI would install to it (as a usbflash drive), now I'm trying to get it to boot...

Jesse

[Sage]

Brilliant, Jesse! Did you notice the incredible speed. Afraid I'm not an IT person, so would appreciate your recipe for getting these to run in Puppy, please - be detailed and explicit! Once you're happy with everything, suggest you contact Barry to have him incorporate same and change the 'coming shortly' message in his menu.

[Jesse]

Hi,

Well I got it to boot! type 1 install. Hey MUT works with it out of the box! coolies.
I am posting this from a scsi booted Puppy!



OK, so how can it work for you too?
Hmm, you need my initrd.gz file.
I've patched it, to have an updated init script, allowing it to scan for SCSI controller and load just ONE scsi driver, the one for my computers scsi controller AHA-2940AU, the module 'aix7xxx' and its one dependancy.

Steps, download, install, boot Puppy 2.02 ONLY!!! important.
1) Install the extra kernel modules, or rip the one you need out of my initrd.gz
2) modprobe your controller 'modprobe aic7xxx'
3) look for your dive in MUT, scsi initialization can take a while, maybe up to a minute for old hardware)
4) create an ext3 partition (or other but that is not what I did), I also made a swap partition.
5) Use PUI to install to the partition, use the 'usbflash' option. Leave MBR alone.
6) fdisk the drive (fdisk /dev/sdb), make sure your partition has 'boot flag' set.
7) edit extlinux.conf change PMEDIA=usbflash to PMEDIA=scsihd and set pfix=sd
overwrite initrd.gz with one attached here.
9) reboot, set bios boot options, scsi controller boot options, and cross fingers.

Is SCSI fast? Well Sage, I was amazed to see the kernel and initrd.gz file load so fast! it could load a 20MB initrd.gz faster than my CDROM or USB drive current 1.2MB initrd.gz. Yes, I couldn't believe my eyes.
But there is the drawback of extended bios boot process which completely cancels out the brief boot speed benefit... but would probably be great in an older computer.

Jesse

[Jesse]

Last attachment wasn't quite 100% (removed it fro previous post), this'll probably be a smidge better.
Hmm, maybe scsi isn't that terribly fast... might have over exagerated in last message... but it is certainly usable
Jesse

[Jesse]

An easier way than all those steps, if you have a USB disk, install puppy to the usb disk, replace initrd.gz with attached one (above), reboot, then continue steps above at step 3.

Jesse

[Sage]

Will try some of that, thanks.
It occurs to me that 'doze only has a couple of generic scsi drivers. I've found they work for just about everything except an old IWill and CMD card. They were written for/by Adaptec, I think? Something similar needed here. Just how difficult is it to examine the code for DSL to see how they do it?

[Sage]

Ah! Fell over at the first hurdle. It's the SW that I don't do. Can manage all of your instructions (I hope) except those in 1) Install the extra kernel modules, or rip the one you need out of my initrd.gz ! Bit more detail, please, if that isn't too tedious for you.

[Sit Heel Speak]

Here are instructions for getting at the contents of initrd.gz, from Jesse's post at

http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.p ... 8&start=16

gunzip initrd.gz
mkdir temp
mount initrd temp -o loop
cp /root/init temp/sbin/init (instruction particular to the #9928 task)
cp /root/elspci temp/bin/elspci (instruction particular to the #9928 task)
umount temp
rmdir temp
gzip initrd

My guess is, inside the temporarily mounted subdir initrd you will find modules specific to your adapter, which you would copy to someplace such as /usr/share/lib or /usr/share/bin or /usr/lib or /usr/bin, and mount at boot time by adding one or more lines to a configuration file such as /etc/rc.d/rc.local (except, probably not rc.local, but rather something which is executed earlier in the boot process) such as

modprobe asusscsi

Jesse, is my guess right?

An easier way than all those steps, if you have a USB disk, install puppy to the usb disk, replace initrd.gz with attached one (above), reboot, then continue steps above at step 3.

Jesse

And now, if you can work this kind of magic for SATA disk drives, then Puppy will be not only able to Yoda old dinosaurs, but also new green-glow-in-the-dark mice...

(sorry; couldn't think of a better analogy for evolution's newest)

[Sit Heel Speak]

Last attachment wasn't quite 100%...Jesse

Jesse: does this initrd.gz also incorporate, besides SCSI capability, the modification for booting from USB through a PCMCIA adapter, as well as the modification which you prescribed to losl for booting a USB stick with a SATA drive present? At the moment I am unable to boot Puppy, so cannot check it myself.

[Jesse]

Hi,

Yes PCMCIA USB is still there.
Yes USB will boot with SATA present.
I have not tried to remove anything.
They are all fairly closely related topics and the solution integrates SATA,USB & SCSI.

Puppy Kernel driver modules are located usually at /lib/modules/2.6.16.7/

Here is location to download the kernel modules:
http://www.puppyos.com/test/
all-modules-k2.6.16.7-PUP202.tar.gz

I just guessed at how to install them (these steps seem to work). However I did get LOTS of debug messages, so I probably did something wrong, you may only want to do this on a Puppy booted with pfix=ram so you do not permanently mess things up.

mkdir temp
cd temp
tar zxvf all-modules-k2.6.16.7-PUP202.tar.gz
cp -prf all-modules/* /lib/modules/2.6.16.7/
depmod

Then start with modprobe x
Here is a list of scsi kernel modules (x) that you can try modprobe x with...

3w-9xxx 3w-xxxx 53c700 a100u2w aha152x aha1542
aha1740 aic79xx aic7xxx aic7xxx_old atp870u BusLogic dc395x
dmx3191d dpt_i2o dtc eata fdomain gdth g_NCR5380
g_NCR5380_mmio ide-scsi imm in2000 initio ips megaraid megaraid
megaraid_sas NCR53c406a nsp32 osst pas16 ppa psi240i qla1280
qlogicfas408 qlogicfas scsi_debug scsi_transport_spi sg sim710 sr_mod
st sym53c416 sym53c8x sym53c8xx_2 t128 tmscsim u14-34f ultrastor
wd7000

Ok yes I can see your eyes glazing over already! there is a way to make this less painful, and more 'automatic', the catch is that initrd expands by about 3MB and we need a program to select the right module for your hardware.
Fortunately this may not be too tricky, as Barry pointed out hwscan from ROCK Linux? (my memory may have failed completely for that reference) which almost does everything we need. But I think I can make it work.

My SATA disk is working under Puppy, are there some types of SATA that do not work? Can people please post what information they can about SATA that does not work, so that we get an indication of what is not working? For starters, just 'make and model' and 'works or no-work' would be good.

Jesse

[Sage]

Grateful I am, but my initial response was 'Help!'.
HW=yes, SW=maybe!

I see my chipset drivers for initio, symbios and aha125xx in your list, but not my ava2906 for zip drive; manipulating them may be a bridge too far?

If there are serious scsi buffs out there, I have W95, NT and SCO Unix V drivers for the CMD CSA65xx series cards and may have Unix and/or Linux drivers for the IWill series - somewhere amongst my vast resources! If these are important to someone, I will dig them out.

[Sage]

Alas! Nothing seems to work. Followed all the above instructions very carefully but nothing works properly. Fiddled a lot but - nothing. The 'all-modules' file is very interesting (it doesn't need to be unpacked to view it -one click activates xarchive) as it contains some webcam files, notably the ubiquitous ov511 driver.
Incidentally, if the file is d/l to the hard disc, advisable since it's 11Mb, then your routine needs to include the full path if running from CD ie /mnt/hdax/temp/all-mod...... Spelling this out may be trivial to you guys, but not to non-SW people like me!
UPDATE: Looks as if my d/l of 'all-modules' is corrupt - got an early EOF message. Back to the drawing board.
Barry's announcement this morning, Monday, is very welcome. This whole coding thing is way out of my league, but I'm awash with HW, so let me know if you need something tested - best I can offer.

[Jesse]

Hi Sage,
In a few days I should have an easy 2 step way to try it rather than a confusing 9 step plan. We could be here till the cows arrive, and I'm not sure you want to hear about console command lines anyway...
I am still learning how it all works myself, and its great to have had quite a few successes so far, yes its pretty arcane how it all works, but there is a nice pattern emerging too which brings a nice simplicity to the picture, like um, like calculus.
At the moment looking at how DSL boots, as they seem to have done something clever.
Jesse

[Sage]

Seems like all the genius genes have migrated to the antipodes! Press on, Jesse, an eager world and yours truly awaits!
And thanks!
PS. Your DSL driver list is most instructive. It does NOT include a number of drivers, eg Symbios, with which it DOES work. Inside knowledge about design, perhaps? Maybe there's only a small list of chipsets that work in more or less the same way? Not accusing anyone of industrial espionage, but designers do attend the same conferences, sit on the same committees and vote for standards!
Your list has Firewire, too, - not that anyone cares a hoot for it.

[Sit Heel Speak]

Hi Sage,
...I'm not sure you want to hear about console command lines anyway...

I want to hear about console command lines! Man, I am eating this up with a spoon!...I crave this new knowledge that I am getting by reading you!

Continue with the educational details, please!