[dm-devel] Re: installing DM on RHES3 on x86_64

[Brian <brian photoresearchers com>]

Sebastien Boving wrote:
> I downloaded the latest dm package from RH themselves, yet seem to be
> unable to apply the patchset to the vanilla RHES3 2.4.21EL-smp kernel.
> It seems that most of this is already in the kernel, or some previous
> versions of it, yet the device-mapper option does not figure in the 'make
> menuconfig' or 'make config' (not in mm/Config).
<snip>
> Anyone went through this before?  To complicate matters, this is a x86_64
> box, probably not related but thought i should mention is.

I've done it before (on an i686 RHEL3 with a base 2.4.21EL-smp kernel).  It's 
not a pure 2.4.21 kernel by any means; it contains a lot of items that have been 
backported from the 2.6 kernel (some of which is a part of device-mapper).  You 
can't really apply the patches out of the box.  It can be made to work but you 
basically have to apply all the patches manually -- look at the individual files 
being modified/added from the 2.4.21 devmapper patch (and better yet, look at 
the files in the patches/common directory) and determine which changes have 
already been backported by RedHat and which haven't.

There are some manual modifications you'll have to make as well -- check the 
archives of this list for a few additional patches I posted a couple of months 
ago, or else figure them out yourself from the compile errors.  :)  If you're 
planning on installing EVMS you'll have to do even more tweaking to get those 
patches to work as well, but with enough effort it *is* possible to get the 
kernel to compile and the tools to work properly (as best I can tell, although I 
gave up on EVMS and decided to stick with LVM2 instead).

Finally, note that patching your kernel in this way to use the latest 
device-mapper (and LVM2 or EVMS) source voids any service contract you may have 
with RedHat, which basically means they're not obligated to help you if you run 
into trouble (although I'm sure the dm-devel list will do the best they can).

Good luck,

Brian