Tag: broadcom

bcmap 0.1

bcmap is a simply program to be linked against klibc to map Broadcom RAIDCORE disks to more sensible and stable device nodes.

Currently the bcraid drivers assign the next available sd node to a detected disk, which is very inconvenient when you have a usb stick inserted on boot which pushes your root disk from sda to sdb.

bcmap ensures that your first array will always be /dev/bca, which is a nice thing.

>>> bcmap-0.1.tar.bz2 (source code)

Licensed under the (holy) GNU GPL v.2

bcraid drivers part two

Here’s a small patch that tweak the broadcom raid drivers for the bc4000 series to run on the latest kernels:

http://w-nz.com/~darkshines/projects/bcraid-2.1.0-bw1.patch

Note that it is everything but complete. Some other pointers getting the bcraid to work:

  • Use sparse memory or conitguous memory instead of incontiguous memory in the memory layout configuration in the kernel. (CONFIG_SPARSEMEM=y)
  • Enable the magic sysrq key (CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ=y)

At the moment I’m trying to get the bcraid module working in an initrd to allow the root partition on the raid drivers.

Gentoo and BC4000 series RAID cards

Raidcore hasn’t released drivers that support gentoo linux, only precompiled drivers for the other big distro’s.

I’ve managed to get the drivers for the bc4000 series to work on Gentoo Linux 2006.0 on linux-2.6.16-gentoo-r9 for the bc4852 card.

You need the driver SDK, which contains the source of the precompiled drivers they distribute.

I had to tweak some kernel configurations to get it to work — first of I had to turn the ‘sysrq magic key’, although it seems easy to remove all sysrq usage in the drivers itself iif you aren’t comfortable with sysrq.

I had to switch from ‘discontiguous memory’ to ‘sparse memory’ layout — the driver relies on the availability of ‘mem_map’.

In the Makefile of the bcraid there’s an issue with the PLATFORM define. It should be defines with ‘uname -m’ instead — otherwise it won’t link in the binary blob.

The bccfg init script they provide seems terribly useless, adding ‘bccfg’, and ‘bcraid’ for that matter, to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 does just as fine, but cleaner.

Initially it seems that everything works fine, although I’m a bit worried about a lot of errors related to the bccfg device nodes in dmesg.