Asus A7V133 and Linux?

[noninterleaved]

I am looking at getting this motherboard, but I am concerned I will have problems with the Promise IDE controller. What if I don't run it in RAID mode, will I still have problems??

Any help would be nice, thanks.

 

[viguru]

Nope, get the motherboard it will work great in Linux. Just no hardware raid.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< Nope, get the motherboard it will work great in Linux. Just no hardware raid. >>



Promise boards dont do hardware raid anyhow. Thats the problem 🙂

 

[viguru]

I thought that he meant the motherboard had raid and he knew it wouldnt work. Linux doesnt support hardware raid in IDE AFAIK, thats what I thought he meant. Anywho...here is a how-to on getting the Asus A7V working Link

 

[DaHitman]

<< I thought that he meant the motherboard had raid and he knew it wouldnt work. Linux doesnt support hardware raid in IDE AFAIK, thats what I thought he meant. Anywho...here is a how-to on getting the Asus A7V working Link >>




hehehe... he keeps using that word... "hardware".... hahahahaahahahah!! WRONG!!

s/hardware/software/g

 

[viguru]

<< hehehe... he keeps using that word... "hardware".... hahahahaahahahah!! WRONG!! >>



I dont understand what you are referring to.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<<

<< hehehe... he keeps using that word... "hardware".... hahahahaahahahah!! WRONG!! >>



I dont understand what you are referring to. >>



Linux and the BSDs can do hardware raid in ide. But since the Promise boards are NOT hardware raid cards it does not matter. Promise boards use proprietary software to get the raid done and have not released any information on it to open source developers. And to complicate matters worse, developers within the USA would be breaking some major laws if they reverse engineered the product to make it compatible.

 

[Nothinman]

I believe one of the FreeBSD developers reverse engineered the on-disk data the Promise and HPT drivers use to do their software RAID and I also believe this information was used to write a working Linux driver, I'm not sure how well it works yet though.

But again, it's still software RAID and nothing that can't be done, possibly better, with md/lvm on Linux and ccd on FreeBSD.

 

[viguru]

Well, Linux doesnt support full hardware raid. Current IDE-RAID hardware is limited to RAID 0/1/10, I guess I was saying that hardware raid is not fully-supported. Right now, software raid is the only way to go. Unless you go SCSI.

 

[Nothinman]

Well, Linux doesnt support full hardware raid. Current IDE-RAID hardware is limited to RAID 0/1/10, I guess I was saying that hardware raid is not fully-supported

If you mean other RAID levels like 5 that's becaue the hardware doesn't do it, because the hardware doesn't do anything. They're just normal ATA/100 controllers with a little bit of hackery to get it to a point where the driver can do the RAID. If you get a real RAID controller, 3Ware makes real IDE RAID controllers, you can do those RAID levels because it's done in hardware.