[5821] in Release_7.7_team
Linux Athena and SATA operation modes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew m. boardman)
Thu Aug 30 17:53:44 2007
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:53:01 -0400
Message-Id: <200708302153.l7ULr1Ck023028@pothole.mit.edu>
From: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
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A lot of people have installed their newer machines with the SATA support
turned off in favor of an IDE-appearing "Legacy Mode" or similar, due to
either older cruftier Linux Athena installers or RHEL4's SATA support
being really slow to catch up to current hardware trends.
SATA support in RHEL4 has mostly caught up, and these people will see a
minor but non-trivial performance increase from switching to the native
driver set.
I have a basic shell script that deals with the conversion, specifically
/afs/dev/user/amb/scripts/convert-to-sata.sh. Any objections to moving
this to the release locker and publishing a stock answer on using it?
(It's moderately fraught with peril, as a bios setting change must be
made concurrently, and doing it wrong yields a non-booting system.)
Current cluster Dell 745s are also being installed in legacy mode. It
looks moderately doable to automatically switch them over to full SATA
noninteractively, but that's another project.
