[CentOS] CentOS and Marvell SAS/SATA drivers

[Chuck Munro]

On 03/05/2011 09:00 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 4:16 PM, compdoc<compdoc at hotrodpc.com>  wrote:
>>> >>If the Marvell drivers don't pan out, it looks like I'll have
>>> >>to either spend money on a 3Ware|LSI|Promise controller
>> >
>> >  The 3ware are excellent...
> And Promise, historically, is*not*.
>
>

Yes, I've had problems with Promise cards in the past, but haven't 
bought any for a long time.  They seem to be moving upscale these days.

Regarding the Marvell drivers, I had good luck with the 'sata_mv' driver 
in Scientific Linux 6 just yesterday, running a pair of 4-port PCIe-x4 
Tempo 'Sonnet' controller cards.  So it appears someone has fixed that 
particular driver.  I've decided to stick with those cards rather than 
re-install the Supermicro/Marvell SAS/SATA 8-port controllers, which use 
the 'mvsas' driver that I had problems with on the RHEL-6 evaluation distro.

So far, SL-6 has performed very well, all RAID-6 arrays re-synced 
properly, and running concurrent forced fscks on eight arrays was very 
fast (because the ext4 filesystems were still empty :-) ).

I think I'll stick with SL-6 as the VM host OS, but will use CentOS for 
the guest VMs.  CentOS-5.x will do fine for now, and I'll have the 
luxury of upgrading guest OSs to CentOS-6 as the opportunity arises.

Chuck