Gentookakis

Note: I am no longer the administrator of gentookakis; it was repossessed by TAMU when I decided to depart, though they have yet to redeploy it. Gentookakis WAS a Sun Fire x4100 server running a Gentoo linux. The server itself is a dual Opteron 270, 4 GB RAM, and a serial attached SCSI RAID. Getting this to work was originally a challenge because the SAS drivers are not native to the 2.6 Linux core. After a bit of pruning in the source tree and thanks to a freestanding AMD64 server at home, I was able to compile a kernel that would boot the machine and from there it was easy. To get the MPI working, it was necessary to recompile all of the source in PIC.

To the ugly details. How did I get it working? In general, the details are presented in a nice wiki >> HOWTO >> Compile a Kernel.

• I cheated.
• I started with the SuSE system that comes with support for SAS. I partitioned the RAID into four, a /boot, a /home directory, a SUSE /root and a Gentoo /root.
• To create the appropriate file structure on the Fire x4100, you need to follow the install docs keeping in mind that you cannot boot off of the LiveCD or LiveDVD. chroot is your friend.
• Capitalizing on my home AMD64, I was able to add support for the SAS MPT FUSION that is native to the X4100. The way to do this is to download the kernel source files [emerge gentoo-sources].
• Copy the MPT FUSION tree into the kernel source directory [most often, this is /usr/src/linux/drivers/message/fusion/]. There are threads on this, you can e-mail me for a fairly recent source tree.
• Gentoo makes it fairly easy to configure support for needed options in the kernel using a make menuconfig command and making sure that you enable support for the SAS MPT FUSION.
• Compile the kernel and install it to /boot with a different name than the SuSE kernel. I just used a USB stick for this.
• Adjust the GRUB to reflect the new kernel and the /root file structure on a partition distinct from the SuSE /root.
• Reboot the system and hope that it boots. If yes, never another problem [until some cool software fails to compile]. If no, good luck!