[Techtalk] Upgrading machines with SATA drives to 2.6.8

[Mary]

On Sun, Dec 05, 2004, Rudy Zijlstra wrote:
> As far as i know, unless you take special action they were under SCSI 
> for all of 2.6. At least all of my SATA drives have always appeared 
> under SCSI.

It always came up as hde durng the boot sequence, although yesterday I
found that sda works *as well*. I'm not exactly sure which driver I was
using, it was the standard driver for the Silicon Image controller.

> You will have to use a kernel with SCSI support. From the above my 
> impression is that you are using an IDE only kernel.
> I am keeping my systems on 2.6.7 whereas 2.6.8.1 and 2.6.9 are 
> acknowledged less stable.

It's unlikely: I'm using the Debian kernels and they build, essentially,
everything as modules, as do most distro kernels. The real problem seems
to be that the appropriate driver is not being placed in the initrd
image and is hence not loaded by the time pivot_root is run. The Debian
kernel building/installing process apparently uses *currently loaded
modules* as the basis for the initrd, which unfortunately strongly
suggests I need to build an initrd, not a kernel :(

I'm a bit reluctant to use an intermediate kernel: 2.6.4, 2.6.5 and
2.6.6 all caused read errors on that hard drive that locked up the
machine (separate problem from current freezes). I want to use 2.6.8/9
because the new SATA driver (which I now know is called "libata") may
have fixed this problem.

-Mary