P5E-VM HDMI compatibility with Debian

zazoo

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Sep 26, 2001
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Hi
I am shopping components for a (will-be) Debian server and am
currently considering the from Asus with the G35 chipset.
Detailed info can be found here
http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=584&l4=0&model=1912&modelmenu=1
Could anyone please help me determine if I might encouter
compatibility issues with linux (etch) especially at the level of the
SATA RAID controller, video and essentials. As it is a server, i don't
particularly care about the sound, hdmi, dual display, firewire.. but
the rest yes.
 

zazoo

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i know it's only a desktop board. Its for a small company server .. mostly file server some mailserver and spam filter. relatively little load, so i dont need to go overboard with a full server setup.
 

vanzandtj

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I just assembled a Linux system with this MB. It has six SATA ports, and I wanted to use three ports for a RAID-5 array. Ports 3 and 4 are "slave", so I first tried ports 1, 2, and 5. However, the kernel (2.6.17) could not find a drive on port 5. I used ports 1, 2, and 3 instead. One drive was out of synch, and the kernel predicted 2.5 days to synchronize. I installed a Promise SATA controller (SATII 150 TX4) instead, and it synchronized 21 times faster.

Note, I believe a RAID array normally cannot be moved from one hardware RAID controller to another, but with software RAID I had no trouble.

The one other hiccup was that the BIOS setup program lists the boot order by drive type (not serial number or port), so setting the boot order was a matter of trial and error.
 


You could also consider using Linux's own built-in md software RAID system. The OS just has all of the HDDs visible to it as discrete disks at boot and then starts RAID later, meaning that the array is completely hardware-independent. The downside is that you cannot boot directly from an md RAID 5 as you need to load most of the OS to be able to start the array.

Also, "master" and "slave" are meaningless for SATA. Each SATA link is independent to the controller, unlike in PATA setups.

The one other hiccup was that the BIOS setup program lists the boot order by drive type (not serial number or port), so setting the boot order was a matter of trial and error.

This can also cause hiccups if you have some drives on the external controller and some on the motherboard's SATA ports. A big suggestion is to rewrite your /etc/fstab using partition UUIDs rather than the typical nodes (e.g. /dev/sda3.) I have my 3 RAID disks on a HighPoint RR2310 controller and my OS drive on my motherboard and my OS constantly swaps the node of the boot drive between /dev/sda and /dev/sdd. It would cause errors when I rebooted until I edited my fstab to do everything by UUIDs.
 

vanzandtj

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Sorry if I wasn't clear - I am using Linux's software RAID. One of the drives has a boot partition and a swap partition. Then /dev/md0 is mounted on /.

Page 2-28 of the ASUS manual for the MB indicates SATA 1/2/5/6 have setting "Master" in "Standard IDE mode", and should get the "primary (boot) hard disk drive". SATA 3/4 are "Slave". It says nothing about a performance difference.

Configuring fstab to use UUIDs is on my todo list.