rhel6 and rhel7 driver compatibility

[Gary Heston]

Does anyone know if driver files from rhel6/centos6 can be used with
rhel7/centos7?

Reason for asking is that I have two older Dell PE 2850 rackmount
servers; I'd like to install centos7 on one of them, but RedHat (and
therefore centos) decided to drop the megaraid driver that supported the
onboard RAID controller used by the PE2850 when they released
rhel/centos7. I've verified by repeated attempts to install centos7 that
the new driver set will not recognize the PE2850 controller at all.

This is complicated a bit by my servers being old enough to use SCSI
drives, which makes it a challenge to try and convert it. From what I
can see, there's no way to mount a SATA/SAS drive internally to allow
booting (possibly excepting a PCIe $$$ SSD card).

I'll have to see if my HP Dl360G4 will handle rhel/centos7, but I'm not
holding my breath.

Oh, if anyone has four PE2850 drive trays that hold SCSI drives and some
300GB SCSI drives, please email. Both servers originally came with four
drives and two fillers. :-(


Gary

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Gary Heston <ghe...@hiwaay.net> said:
>Does anyone know if driver files from rhel6/centos6 can be used with
>rhel7/centos7?

As far as I know, no, that won't work. Your best bets:

- Stick with RHEL/CentOS 6 on the older hardware.

- Build the megaraid module(s) (IIRC the later SCSI MegaRAIDs use the
megaraid_mbox+megaraid_mm modules) yourself. This actually isn't too
difficult, especially if you are familiar with source RPMs. You can
take the kernel source RPM (same version as the initial release),
modify the relevant config file to define the right thing to enable
the megaraid module, and then rebuild the binary RPM. Extract the
megaraid module file(s), build a RHEL 7 driver disk (I think they're
still supported with the new anaconda), and go.

Before rebooting, you'll have to manually copy over the module file
and re-run dracut to rebuild the initramfs (the installed kernel
wouldn't have the module). You'll also either have to figure out the
kabi and/or kmod stuff (haven't done this myself) or always rebuild
your own patched kernel RPMs.

--
Chris Adams <cma...@cmadams.net>