The MPT fusion device driver for the LSI SAS 1064 chipset is only natively supported in Solaris 10. Sun provides an extra-drivers CD for two distributions RH and SuSE enterprise editions and offers a rather involved procedure for creating install media with the appropriate drivers on alimited set of these distributions:
Red Hat Linux 3.0 Update 5 and later updates, 32-bit and 64-bit
Red Hat Linux 4.0 Update 1 and later updates, 64-bit
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP1 and later SPs, 64-bit
Others have documented successful use of this procedure with Debian. (And here.)
Sun also provides a utility called Sun Installation Assistant.
The Sun Installation Assistant software on CD-ROM is included in the ship-kit with every Sun Fire X4100 and X4200 server. It’s a Linux installation utility that ‘reduces the complexity of installing supported Linux distributions on new hardware’.
A newly released platform seldom has a certified set of drivers already in a current Linux distribution. Typically, the result is that an administrator will be required to generate driver disks for each of the supported Linux distributions that they plan to install. Additionally, Linux distributions do not contain support for non-platform drivers such as the Service Processor. A complete Linux installation on a Sun Fire X4100 or X4200 server can be performed using the Sun Installation Assistant CD-ROM either locally or remotely using the remote KVMS features provided by ILOM and the JavaRConsole. Once the system has been booted from the media or image, a boot kernel is loaded and probes the platform configuration. Upon recognition that the server is a supported platform, a list of the currently supported Linux distributions is displayed and the user is prompted to insert disk 1 of the supported Linux distribution of their choice. Disk 1 can be either a physical CD-ROM disk or a JavaRConsole redirected iso disk image. The Linux distribution installation continues as usual until completion.
Following installation completion, the certified platform and device drivers are installed and the complete installation is completed without necessitating cumbersome driver installation procedures.
The Sun Installation Assistant manages the software installation of:
Supported Linux operating systems
Platform-specific software
Diagnostic and fault management software
Add-on components such as the JES middleware stack
The latest version of Ubuntu v6.06 LTS codenamed Dapper Drake, has the MPT drivers integrated into the distribution. it’s available here. It boots, sees the disks on their new controllers, configs and loads. It plays well with our NIS and NFS domains.
Now we’re waiting for 454 test data.