hi all,

I have to configure an Intel desktop motherboard based "server" with 4 disks, using linux software raid (2 raid1 arrays). The type of motherboard is Intel Desktop Board D925XEBC2 "BlackCanyon". The gigabit ethernet controller is Marvell Yukon based (Syskonnekt) and stock kernel has problems using it. It doesn't complain, lspci "sees" it (it's not a big thing at all) but nothing under /proc/net/sk98lin/ (there should be an eth0 at least). I upgraded the stcok kernel to the newer one, 2.6.9-11 EL kernel but it doesn't work too. I tried to compile it as a module and to compile the driver into the kernel. After I downloaded the tar.gz and newest driver from marvell.com and compiled it against the official EL kernel source it worked... for 2 seconds. After that I got a kernel panic. I downloaded the latest vanilla kernel, version 2.6.12.3, compiled it with the patched driver. Right now the kernel sees the ethernet card but there are three problems: - this kernel is not the overpatched, stress tested kernel source (lots of applications and 3rd party drivers require RH kernels) but I can live with it - the boot is terribly sloooooooow. at startup when udev starts the boot process hangs for a while. That should be the version mismatch between kernel version (2.6.12.3) and udev (latest is 0.60, CentOS/RHEL includes 0.39). As far as I've seen the changelogs and lkml archives an udev upgrade should help. But I don't want to replace everything. - it seems that the system constantly uses the disks! The HDD activity LED full time active. If I boot the stock kernel it doesn't do so this was after the upgrade. anybody seen such thing before? (Maybe that's udev related too but I don't think so). It seems that there's no constant writes but it's strange. I used dstat to get this result maybe there's a better option.

Any comments appriciated.

bye, Ago