Problem Upgrading QLA2300 Driver / Building Driver

[Lee Harris_5]

I have a DL580 G2 running RHEL-AS-3-U3 which is currently running the QLA2300/2310 7.01.01 driver. According to the README this driver DOES support failover. I have followed the instructions to enable failover support, but when trying to configure the cards in SANsurfer to do failover a message appears advising that the failover driver is not loaded.

I am now trying to upgrade to a newer driver, and plan to try and enable that for failover support (thinking maybe the older driver has a bug) but I have hit problems doing this.

First off, I cannot seem to remove the old driver module. I have removed all references of the qla modules from /etc/modules.conf and removed all SAN filesystems etc. I have also rpm -e'd the ql2x00...rpm driver. However I am not able to modprobe -r qla2300. I keep getting a Device Busy message. I also tried rebuilding the RAMdisk and rebooting but I still cannot remove the qla2300 module.

I spoke to a colleague who said that I shouldn't have to remove the module, but if I install a newer version it will overwrite the older one and be used instead.

I first off tried the 7.07.01 version for RHEL3 (2.4 kernels) from QLogic. I have unpacked the tgz source file, ran the drvrinstall and then attempt to run make all SMP=1 but this process fails with the message... make: *** [qla2200.o] Error 1.

I then tried the hp supplied driver for their re-badged QLA2310s (FC2214's or something)... I perform an rpm -Uhv hp_qla2x00src-7.07.03p3-19.linux.rpm but this exits with the message "The compilation did not suceed".

Not sure what the problem is here. Anyone come across this before?

[Sung Oh]

Hi Lee,

here is common problem with QLA driver
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/qla-autoconf/

Regards,
Sung

[Jess Long]

Lee:

The HP version of the QLA driver requires that you have the kernel source for the running kernel installed on your system.

[Barry Lowe]

From limited experience (RHEL4 only) you should always use the HP HBA drivers as the ones from QLogic are not really supported due to it being an OEM HBA. QLogic support tended to be very helpful with me, until they realised I also had an OEM HBA from HP.

One thing to check for is that ql2xfailover=1 in modules.conf.

You could also try installing the latest Proliant Support Pack, which includes the latest HBA drivers. Make sure to 'configure' the HBA driver for QLogicFailover, rather than the default 'SinglePath'.

HTH.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

I agree with Barry that HP drivers must be used. You may want to boot single user mode to avoid the device busy message when you rpm -e

or rpm -e --nodeps

SEP

[Lee Harris_5]

Thanks for the replies, but I discovered that the problem was due to a configuration of our RedHat builds. Our DBAs had aparently insisted (because of some Oracle requirement or other) that the gcc and g++ compilers be relinked to older RedHat 7.3 versions. I modified the links back to the original versions and the drivers compiled without any problems.

Thanks