Developer help wanted.

lonewolfnight · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2004 Posts: 14 Location: St. Paul MN

This is as much a rant as it is a request for help. A year ago I put together a large SAN iscsi system for our new facility. At that time Qlogic listed thier 4010C iscsi cards as being compatable with linux 2.4/2.6 kernels. Since they were so new very few people had used them. Now, after the fiscal process etc I've received and installed all of the equipement in the server room. I finally came to some of our development machines (gentoo) low and behold Qlogic drivers DON'T work at all with any 2.4/2.6 kernel. Instead they've updated thier documentation and left me hanging with a bunch of Qlogic 4010c cards that have no support unless I install RHE or SUSE enterprise. This totally defeats our purpose. We use kernel hacks and checks from the vanilla kernel. Qlogic just shrugged thier shoulders and left me hanging. So I'm asking if anyone out there is interested in taking on the project to get the source that they build against a rh kernel working on a vanilla source of some kind. I'm happy to lend the cards out/buy a bunch of beer!

On a side note this really frustrates me. Linux was once a community of develpment and advancement of a system. Now, as manufactures jump on the boat we loose that dream. Good grief, we purchase the hardware why do the drivers have to become some super secret company specific deal?! !?

*sheepishly gets down from his soap box.

Any help is appreciated in this matter.

Thanks,
Lonewolfnight

occ · Apprentice Joined: 06 May 2005 Posts: 202

lonewolfnight · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2004 Posts: 14 Location: St. Paul MN

Well my frustration still revolves around not being able to complie custom kernels. Well, my experience with RH kernels is that you have to take them as the come or they never compile properly. In our case our system are emt64 which has little or no support at the 2.6.9 kernel. Thus why I had hoped that someone might be willing to help with getting the source to work with a vanilla kernel. I do appreciate the idea. I also tried running the cent os distro but that became too frustrating since it defeated the purpose.

any other thoughts?

Thanks

tcook · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2006 Posts: 6