Using the 1.4 rc4 3stages install cd, I emerged gentoo-sources. I stripped down the configs to just the items that exist in the 2.4.20 vanilla source and built a kernel with gdth, scsi, scsi disk and scsi generic support compiled in. On top of that there was support for reiser, ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Everything compiled just fine, but the kernel would religiously give me VFS root=sda3 not valid errors. Without changing my grub configuration at all, I built the smae kernel from the vanilla sources and it worked. I'm not sure what patch to the gentoo-sources is doing it, but it's there somewhere. If it's of any notice, the kernel kept trying to modprobe for block-major-8 (which is the scsi subsystem) which was compiled into the source. Sorry to be vague on the location of the problem fellas. Also, I couldn't find any dups on this one, but found quite a bit of traffic for similar problems with different hardware on the forums. --Robert Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Have an Intel on board raid controller. 2. Configure two 37GB drives to raid 1. 3. Follow install until kernel configs. 4. make menuconfig 5. compile in scsi, scsi generic, scsi disk, Intel (gdth) low level. Everything else is pretty generic and not related to scsi subsystem. 6. Build and install kernel (make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install && cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot) 7. Reboot and may the force be with you. Actual Results: See details. Expected Results: Not caused a kernel panic and found the gdth code that is compiled in the kernel. I'm leaving this as a Normal priority as I imagine that the majority of the users are not going to have SCSI hardware on their systems. This is just an annoyance and I'm sure that the gdth code is being masked by something in a patch (maybe something with a bad major device number?).
have you tried any newer gentoo-sources? is this still a problem?
I fell back to vanilla sources and haven't had any troubles with that. It's a production server so I haven't been putting much effort into getting the gentoo sources to work. I'd close the call at this point with 2.6 out.
Closed per request of the reporter.
Closed per reporter's request.
