ASL Kernel on HP Server with Smart Array Controller

[jonathantn]

I wanted to contribute this information to the community. When ASL upgrades from CentOS 5 or Centos 6 kernel to the ASL kernel on an HP server with a smart array controller, the root partition will not be found. Here are the steps to fix this problem. It involves building a newer driver capable of supporting HP Gen 8 raid controllers. The ASL kernel is shipping with a 2.0.2-1 which does not. RH6 ships with 3.4.0-1-RH1. So we're going to build from source the latest 3.4.4 driver and then update the boot image to include the proper dependencies.

1) Boot the stock 2.6 or other working kernel
2) Download the tar BZ file for the HPSA driver to ~/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cciss/f ... hivelocity
3) uncompress with
tar jxf hpsa-3.4.4-125.tar.bz2
4) yum --enablerepo=tortix-kernel install kernel-headers kernel-devel
5) Go into the ~/hpsa-3.4.4/hpsa/drivers/scsi directory and edit the Makefile. Replace "uname -r" with the actual kernel name like 3.2.58-68.art.x86_64
6) make
7) strip --strip-debug hpsa.ko
cp hpsa.ko /lib/modules/3.2.58-68.art.x86_64/kernel/drivers/scsi/
9) Modify /etc/modprobe.conf and change "cciss" to "hpsa"
10) cd /boot
mkinitrd /boot/initrd-3.2.58-68.art.x86_64.img 3.2.58-68.art.x86_64 -f --builtin=ehci-hcd --builtin=ohci-hcd --builtin=uhci-hcd --preload=sg --preload=sd_mod
11) reboot into the new kernel new 3.2 kernel

I've provided this information to the ASL team and asked them to start shipping a newer HPSA driver and make sure that the insmod commands for it, sg, and sd_mod are in the initrd/init script.