qla2300 modules

[D Canfield <canfield uindy edu>]

I've been working with RHEL 3 (and 2.1 for that matter) on an IBM
BladeCenter booting off of a FAStT 200 SAN and encountered a few
issues.  I'm explaining a lot of extra stuff here for the reference of
others who might be trying this, but there is also a question about the
kernel for Red Hat at the bottom, so please bear with me...

The blade can be installed just fine as long as you boot the installer
with "linux noprobe" and then manually load the qla2300 module with the
option "ql2xfailover=1" (this prevents you from seeing 2-4 instances of
the SAN disks and I'd recommend that if possible, the installer should
add this option automatically as the failover version of the driver was
the default in previous releases).  

However, in order to get the driver module configured to properly
support the redundant paths and failover features of a SAN, it's
necessary to use a gui program (QLogic SANSurfer or IBM FASTT_MSJ
depending on the branding) which ultimately adds a number of
nearly-unintelligible parameters to modules.conf.  

The first issue with this is that the IBM JRE that ships with all of
IBM's current software is broken under RHEL 3, so the Java Installers in
these packages doesn't work (I don't expect Red Hat to do anything about
that... I'm sure IBM will update their packages in due time).  So, I
went ahead and grabbed newer versions from qlogic, and these happily
install on RHEL 3 boxes.  The qlremote agent can then be started and the
SANSurfer client can connect and view everything as it should.

Now the "big" problem that I have is that in order to save the settings,
the qlremote program triggers something that tries to load the
ql2300_conf.o kernel module which is missing from the RHEL
distribution.  It looks like some of the C files are in the kernel
sources, but enough files are missing that this module cannot be
compiled.  Additionally, the version of the ql2300 driver that Red Hat
is using doesn't seem to be readily available for me to add these files
back and compile just the ql2300_conf module. 

I *could* update the kernel modules to the version distributed by qlogic
on their web site, but I assume that would leave me with an unsupported
configuration as far as Red Hat is concerned.  Unfortunately, without
the qla2300_conf.o module, having the qla2300.o module in the
distribution doesn't allow the creation of a reliable environment, so
what's the point?  Would it be possible to get the qla2300_conf.o module
added to future kernels?  Yes, an external binary is needed to make use
of the module, but I can't think of any other practical way of
supporting a SAN with the qla2300 drivers.

The workaround I am looking into now is upgrading to the qlogic kernel
module on a test blade and then copying the modules.conf parameters to
the production boxes, but I'm not sure how/if that will work yet.

Thanks for any insights.

DC