Integrated Smart Array Controller (ROC):
Even though the ROC supports raid on one channel and a tape drive on the other, the driver in linux (cpqarray) does not yet support tape drives. In a system with a ROC chip where you want to perform raid on hard drives and also have a tape backup, there are two solutions:
  1. Remove the ROC chip and install a Compaq Smart Array PCI controller to support the hard drives and leave the integrated SCSI to support the tape drive.

  2. Leave the ROC chip in place, let it control the hard drives with raid, install a Compaq SCSI controller to support the tape drive.
PL4500:
The PL4500 is a unique box. It seems to be the only one that has the NCR53c825 chipset and be entirely EISA based (no PCI slots). As far as I can tell (I am currently checking into this 7/8/00) the NCR53c8xx driver does not support EISA. I cannot find a way to pass the io_port nor irq to the driver so it can find the board (EISA is not easily detected by drivers, most of the time it is required to pass the io_port and sometimes the irq). The only solution at the current time is to install a Linux supported controller board. A couple of choices of Linux compatable boards are as follows:
RA8000:
There is current support, see ra.html.

RA4000/RA4100:

You can use the cpqfc driver, which has been released and is in Red Hat 7.0.

It only supports one card: the 64-bit/66MHz Fibre Channel Host Adapter.

This information is on the Options Support Matrix, at:

http://www.compaq.com/products/servers/linux/OptionsMatrix.html

Here's the FreshMeat page for this driver:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/cpqfc/

When using this driver, your arrays will be accessed through the standard
SCSI devices, such as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. This is different from our
other array controllers which use their own device names (like
/dev/ida/c0d0, etc.).

(updated 10-27-00)



Drivers commonly needed by Compaq Servers:
 cpqarray

Symbios/NCR53c8xx

tlan

e100

e1000

eepro100

Amd PCnet32