Don't worry about old versions of Linux—use DKMS to easily create RAID card drivers

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Don’t worry about the old version of Linux - use DKMS to easily create a RAID card driver

In our technical support work, we often encounter customers who need to install an old version of the Linux operating system on our new servers. However, the old version of Linux does not have driver files for external new hardware and cannot be installed directly. Some customers will install older versions of Linux through virtual machines.

However, for some customers, due to various reasons, Linux cannot run on a virtual machine and needs to run directly on the chemical server hardware, which brings a lot of trouble. In this article, we will explain how to make a driver and install the system in these cases.

When installing a Linux operating system, the biggest difficulty is often the RAID card driver. This RAID card driver needs to be loaded when installing Linux. Without it, the hard disk cannot be recognized.Linux with the best support for old machines , Linux will also be difficult to install. When the operating system cannot manually recognize the RAID card, you need to find the corresponding driver in advance to successfully install Linux. Hardware manufacturers often no longer provide drivers for older versions of Linux. In this case, you need to use the sourcecode (source code) provided by the RAID card manufacturer to make your own RAID card driver.

On the driver download page for the PowerEdgeR730 server on Dell's official website, the PERC9 series RAID cards only provide downloads of versions 6.5, 6.6 and 6.7 in addition to RedHatEnterpriseLinux7. And this does not mean that earlier versions are difficult to support.

There are many ways to make a RAID card driver. One is to add the driver to the kernel for compilation. This method also has limitations - once an error is reported during the driver production process, it is not easy to find the cause of the error, which greatly reduces the difficulty of production. And if you need to upgrade the kernel, you need to recompile the RAID card driver.

Here is another way to use the DKMS tool to easily create a RAID card driver.

DKMS (DynamicKernelModuleSupport) is an open source project of Dell. The homepage is at

The purpose of DKMS is to make the source code of modules that depend on the kernel independent so that they can be easily rebuilt when upgrading the kernel. Linux modules and the kernel are dependent on linux deepin. If the kernel version is upgraded or changed, the originally compiled driver module will be difficult to continue using and will need to be automatically compiled again. This is what the DKMS project created by Dell is all about. DKMS can help us maintain this kind of driver outside the kernel, and we can manually regenerate new modules after the kernel version changes. In addition, DKMS also provides powerful functions, which can use the source code of the driver to compile the corresponding version of the driver. Because of the powerful functions of DKMS tools, many manufacturers will also release DKMS version drivers.

The usage process of DKMS can be seen in the picture on the right:

Here we take the old version of RedHatLinux as an example and use DKMS to make the PERCH730RAID card driver.

First install the Linux system and related modules that need to be installed on a virtual machine.

Then go to the LSI (now Avago) website to download the Linux driver for the MegaRAIDSAS9361-8i corresponding to the H730. After decompression, there is a megaraid_sas-06.806.08.00-1.dkms.tar.gz file in the dkms-1 directory. After decompressing the file, there are two files dkms-2.0.21.1-1.noarch.rpm and megaaid_sas-06.806.08.00-1dkms.noarch.rpm.

1.Install dkms:#rpm–ivhdkms-2.0.21.1-1.noarch.rpm

2. Install RAID card driver: #rpm-ivhmegaraid_sas-06.806.08.00-1dkms.noarch.rpm

3.DKMS will add the driver module to the directory tree, copy the driver source code to the corresponding location, and generate the corresponding driver module file. You can also use DKMS alone to generate driver module files. #dkmsbuild-mmegaraid_sas-v06.806.08.00-k2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64-ax86_64

4. Finally, you can use DKMS to generate the driver image file under Redhat: #dkmsmkdriverdisk-dredhat-mmegaraid_sas-v06.806.08.00-k2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64-ax86_64 In this way, it is easy to use the DKMS tool. Create a RAID card driver image file.

5. You can also use DKMS to create an rpm installation package linux to check the disk space. People who are not familiar with Linux can easily use prepared network cards or other drivers or software rpm packages to install. #dkmsmkrpm-mmegaraid_sas-v06.806.08.00

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