I bought several HP DL360 G4p from Server Monkey to use as test machines for OpenStack. Unfortunately, the HP SmartArray 6i SCSI RAID controller that is installed in these machines is not supported by the RHEL 7.0.
The cciss driver required for the controller is still part of the main kernel, it’s just not shipped as part of RHEL 7.0. Luckily, the folks over at ELRepo have packaged it as a rpm for RHEL 7.0. Therefore, it’s just a simple matter of creating a driver disk and passing that into my PXE boot configuration.
The process for creating a custom driver disk is not very well documented, but I was able to figure it out with help from a ServerFault post and the Anaconda documentation.
First, a file listing:
[root@galadriel driver-disk.dd]# find . . ./.rundepmod ./rhdd3 ./lib ./lib/modules ./lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64 ./lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64/extra ./lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64/extra/cciss ./lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64/extra/cciss/cciss.ko ./rpms ./rpms/x86_64 ./rpms/x86_64/kmod-cciss-3.6.26-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64.rpm ./rpms/x86_64/repodata ./rpms/x86_64/repodata/81edea4e4e681ecaf9bd2d69f892fa4a6e5f41446fa3901c0e3d87811e97924d-other.sqlite.bz2 ./rpms/x86_64/repodata/b129d7b9d5a16636ed6994d497dcf231bd284d911741b76ce23c0f81fbb57eef-other.xml.gz ./rpms/x86_64/repodata/7c42124667dc18342f5c2b3a9eca1a7a1eb0a746244c72952fd4cd76c0146fd3-filelists.sqlite.bz2 ./rpms/x86_64/repodata/07cf2140f7d4cfe78d4060c613df0b796188ba4c8930f66e7caceeaa5ed15dca-filelists.xml.gz ./rpms/x86_64/repodata/b5069256f906462e578f10f143b96685d96a64ec975a9808144250a9f13858c9-primary.sqlite.bz2 ./rpms/x86_64/repodata/04e91716ec87e592b2324e488337155b83e46cb1d42eef776fe01581fefe8f45-primary.xml.gz ./rpms/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml
.rundepmod is just an empty file. It instructs Anaconda to run depmod to find dependancies.
rhdd3 contains a one line description of what’s on the driver disk. Mine just has: cciss drivers from ElRepo
To populate the lib directory, I installed the kmod-cciss package on a working RHEL server, and then copied it to the directory.
[root@galadriel driver-disk.dd]# tar cvf - /lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64/extra/cciss | tar xvf - tar: Removing leading `/' from member names /lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64/extra/cciss/ /lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64/extra/cciss/cciss.ko lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64/extra/cciss/ lib/modules/3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64/extra/cciss/cciss.ko
The final bit is the repository. I just downloaded the rpm from ELRepo, and used the createrepo command.
[root@galadriel driver-disk.dd]# mkdir -p ./rpms/x86_64 [root@galadriel driver-disk.dd]# cd ./rpms/x86_64 [root@galadriel x86_64]# curl -O http://mirror.symnds.com/distributions/elrepo/elrepo/el7/x86_64/RPMS/kmod-cciss-3.6.26-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64.rpm % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 45528 100 45528 0 0 70041 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 70043 [root@galadriel x86_64]# createrepo . Spawning worker 0 with 1 pkgs Spawning worker 1 with 0 pkgs Workers Finished Saving Primary metadata Saving file lists metadata Saving other metadata Generating sqlite DBs Sqlite DBs complete
With all these bits in place, I created an ISO, and served it up via http.
[root@galadriel driver-disk.dd]# mkisofs -V OEMDRV -r . | cat > /var/www/html/cciss.iso I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings) Total translation table size: 0 Total rockridge attributes bytes: 3256 Total directory bytes: 16384 Path table size(bytes): 128 Max brk space used 23000 273 extents written (0 MB)
I’m PXE booting all these hosts, so in order to use my newly created driver disk, I had to add the inst.dd parameter to my boot parameters:
label linux menu label ^Install system text menu default kernel rhel7/vmlinuz append initrd=rhel7/initrd.img ip=dhcp inst.text inst.repo=nfs:172.31.0.21:/export/media/rhel7-amd64 inst.dd=http://172.31.0.21/cciss.iso
Next time I booted up the servers, Anaconda downloaded and mounted the ISO, and installed the disks.
This is, of course, completely non-supported, but I don’t really care because these are my personal lab machines.
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