LINUX on ASUS K8N-DL
felixOrg has been around since about 1998, and the Wayback Machine shows some of its earlier incarnations. The host for felixOrg for the majority of its existence was Old Janus (janus.felix.org). Old Janus died in March 2005. While only a 100 MHz PIII, he was a good soldier with a gig and a half of memory, and fully capable of handling anything I threw at him. He will be missed.
Young Janus has shouldered the load in the meantime. An old Celeron, cobbled together from spare parts and the drives from Old Janus, he stood the watch, but he's not the man his father was. I knew that he would have to be replaced, but I had a bit of time to plan. It was time to create a new generation of machine, one that would serve for several years into the future. He would need processor power, memory in abundance, and lots and lots of drive space. I bided my time as prices continued to fall, as they always do, and when 250GB SATA drives reached $109 apiece, I know the time had come to build.
The result is Abelard. He's a monster, sporting two 64-bit Opteron processors, 3GB of RAM, and a terabyte and a half of RAID5 disk storage. Named after the most famous man of the 12th century, Peter (Pierre) Abelard, he too almost faced castration as I fought with the peculiarities of the ASUS K8N-DL motherboard (well documented elsewhere). If I had been content with Windows, all would have been well, but I held out for Linux, and it took Gentoo to make Abelard come to heel.
He's now up and operating, awaiting only one more component to bring his RAID online, as neither the Silicon Image and NVidia RAID controllers onboard the K8N-DL are ready for prime time in Linux. Oh well, the 3Ware Escalade 9500S with battery backup is a much faster solution anyway. The important thing, though, is that the hardware fight is over. Now it's time to create a useful tool.
On the software side, Drupal has taken the place of Plone as the felixOrg site's foundation. I'll have some learning to do, but isn't that really what it's all about anyway?
Cry for Help from Monarch Computer
Posted on the Monarch Computer Forum in August:
---
I notice that Monarch uses the Asus K8N-DL in the Empro Ultimate workstation. I purchased similar components from Monarch recently including the K8N-DL with the intent of building a massive file server using the eight SATA ports on that motherboard to drive eight SATA drives in a 1.5 TB Linux software RAID 5 configuration with hot spare. The OS was to be installed on a traditional PATA drive.
I'm having a great deal of trouble, though, installing Linux, both Fedora Core 4 and Gentoo.
The Fedora Core 4 x86-64 installation only worked using a "noapic" flag, but it would halt during the install process at various places. I finally got what I thought was a good minimal load and updated the kernel + packages -- still, the machine locks up at odd times indicating an unstable installation.
Gentoo AMD64 2005.0 originally booted into its installation screen, again using "noapic," but only intermittently. I'd really rather use Fedora, though, for ease of administration.
Various net searches indicate that the nVidia SATA driver (sata_nv) in the 2.6.12 kernel is not stable and may be responsible for these problems. I hate, though, to lose 50% of my SATA capability; 8 SATA ports was the main reason I chose the K8N-DL board to begin with.
I see that Monarch offers installation of Fedora Cores 3 and 4 using the K8N-DL motherboard in the Empro workstation. I would really appreciate it if you would share any installation hints you use, pitfalls you've encountered, or functionality you've had to disable to get this configuration to work.
Tks,
RF
Posted in response by lynm
Posted in response by lynm on the Monarch Computer Forum:
Hi, while I'm not a support person at monarch I too have the same motherboard you do. I've found that if you disable APCI in the bios that it will boot normally with a single CPU kernel. I cannot however, get it to boot with the SMP kernel no matter what I try. I've done everything from rebuilding the kernel from scratch to trying all sorts of flags. If the support here at monarch can at least verify that they are having the same problems with a dual CPU set-up I would appreciate it. On a side note, I was able to boot with ACPI enabled with the latest BIOS (1006) but it still hangs on analyzing the first SATA drive with the SMP kernel.
Posted by me today:
Posted by me today:
Since August, having no reply, I have successfully booted Gentoo 2005.1. It required disabling the BIOS APIC, as you mention, and leaving the Silicon Image controller enabled. I've had no trouble getting a new kernel built and running it with SMP.
The only hitch so far is that the NVidia SATA controller has never worked, and the Silicom Image controller seemed to work but exhibited multiple access errors. I finally bought an AMCC 3ware hardware RAID controller card which thus far seems to be working well.
I'd be happy to share any of the settings that are working for me. Also, for more info, see my site at https://www.felix.org.
More informations on your K8N-DL Linux Install
Hi,
I've got some problems ton install Linux on the same mother board (K8N-DL).
I would like to install Linux on RAID1 (via NVIDIA IDE) but install only see hard drives .. no created arrays.
Can you help me ?
Best regards
Stephane.Guedon@stratorga.com
NVidia RAID Driver
More specifics needed. What LINUX distribution are you using? I mentioned above that I couldn't even get Fedora 4 to boot, and that I finally went with Gentoo 2005.1. There's a page of info on getting this motherboard running at the Gentoo site.
I was never able to get either the NVidia or SiL RAID controllers to work properly, but I've had no problems with the 3Ware 9500 HW RAID controller other than a bad battery backup unit that was quickly replaced by 3Ware/AMCC. I still run my root and boot partitions from a PATA hard drive, but I'm confident enough now that I may move it to the 3Ware RAID array.
Robin Felix
Post new comment