scsi issue review

[Charles Steinkuehler]

All About Computers & Web Design wrote:

> Almost all the distros have asked me for special driver disk... i guess
> the whole problem stems from me not knowing how to make the above said
> disk or where to get the linux driver for my particular EISA/SCSI card..
> I think i may need more help.

Hmm...I think you might be running into one of two potential problems:

1) The drivers for your EISA SCSI card are broken in all the kernels 
you've tried, except the RH 6.0 kernel.  This is possible (the EISA/VLB 
drivers don't exactly get a lot of regression testing) but it sounds 
like you've tried a number of different versions with pretty much the 
same result.

2) Your kernel is built without EISA bus support, or perhpas without 
proper options for the aic7xxx driver.  I think this could be much more 
likely.

A brief check of the kernel source directory on my RH 8.0 box gives the 
following:

[root at localhost linux-2.4.18-14]# grep EISA .config
# CONFIG_AIC7XXX_PROBE_EISA_VL is not set
CONFIG_EISA=y

It looks like the default RH 8.0 kernel is setup to talk to the EISA bus 
(the first hurdle), but it won't automatically probe for an EISA based 
Adaptec card.  This is probably so the probing won't hose some more 
modern system (random EISA and ISA probing for hardware you don't have 
can cause wierd side effects), but should probably be turned on in your 
case.  This could be the main reason why none of the recent kernels 
recognize your card.  You could try recompiling the module with the EISA 
probing option enabled, or possibly passing parameters to the driver 
would work.  See the aic7xxx readme in the kernel source tree 
(drivers/scsi/) as well as the driver code itself for details.

I also wouldn't be too suprised if the default kernel config file on 
some distributions didn't include EISA (or MCA) support at all...

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net