Best way to use proprietary driver for HP B120i

Issues related to hardware problems
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vbezhenar
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Joined: 2018/05/09 21:35:14

Best way to use proprietary driver for HP B120i

Post by vbezhenar » 2018/05/09 21:50:23

I'm using CentOS with HP server. This server uses B120i fakeraid controller, so I must use its proprietary driver. I know that this fakeraid is bad overall and it's better to use AHCI, but there are some reasons why I'm using it, so the question is what's the best way to use it.

HP usually lags behind RHEL releases, and release their drivers months after new RHEL (and CentOS) released. Also sometimes this driver works with new kernel, sometimes not. For example with kernel from 7.4, driver from 7.3 just didn't work and caused kernel panic on boot. But with 7.5 driver from 7.4 seems to work. But I'm not sure if it's stable enough.

I don't really understand why driver must be updated. I thought that RHEL freezes Linux kernel at some version and doesn't change even its internal API, but apparently that's not the case. Or is that kernel panic with 7.3 driver on 7.4 kernel was a rare exception and usually drivers are expected to work?

Also I don't really understand the consequences of using old kernel with new CentOS, for example using kernel from 7.4 with CentOS 7.5. Theoretically kernel shouldn't break userspace, but is there some guarantees? I'm especially interested with Docker and Systemd, good old server software probably won't be affected, but those programs, AFAIK, are tightly coupled with kernel.

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TrevorH
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Re: Best way to use proprietary driver for HP B120i

Post by TrevorH » 2018/05/10 01:17:47

HP usually lags behind RHEL releases, and release their drivers months after new RHEL (and CentOS) released. Also sometimes this driver works with new kernel, sometimes not. For example with kernel from 7.4, driver from 7.3 just didn't work and caused kernel panic on boot. But with 7.5 driver from 7.4 seems to work. But I'm not sure if it's stable enough.
Which is exactly why everyone says to junk the proprietary driver and use AHCI. Be aware that the DRBD authors have said that 7.5 has silently changed and broken the KABI so that drbd modules intended for 7.4 will load correctly and then do Bad Things(TM). I do not know if that applies to other modules than the drbd.ko module.

The RHEL kernel has a stable KABI. That KABI is a list of functions that they will not change in the way they are called or what they return but it's a subset of all kernel functions so others can change.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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