Now that I've burnt my own Fedora DVD to a disc using my new NEC ND-2500 DVD burner, I can boot from that DVD, only to find out that the RAID-0 partition I had created over the two disks, is not supported. Using the RAID-0, I can gain quite a bit of performance (90MB/s!!!) over using one disk and I can share my disk with a Windows installation... But how do I get Linux to recognize that RAID set?

Using Google, I found this page on Serial ATA support for Linux. Apparently, the Fedora installer does support the chipset and recognizes the drive, but not the RAID set.

I need to use Thomas Horsten's medley driver for the Linux 2.4 kernels to use the RAID set. The 2.6 kernels are not supported yet. The only way to get the Fedora installer to recognize my SATA RAID set, is to include the driver in the Fedora installer. Probably the best way to do this is to create a Fedora driver disk; yet another problem...

I started out using Doug Ledford's Red Hat Device Driver Update Disk Devel Kit, but found it didn't support Fedora and was too complex in use. This page gives a good description of building Red Hat driver disks. I found the pci table from an in initial patch for the 2.6 kernel.

It turns out that the Fedora driver disk has a somewhat different format than the original Red Hat driver disks. Only one post on the Anaconda development list explains the differences. Fedora has two installation kernels, an i386 kernel for the boot disks (for space reasons) and an i586 kernel for the cd installer. So, the driver disk needs to support i386, i586 and needs an athlon driver for the final kernel. Also, I need to include both the medley and the ataraid drivers, since the ataraid module is a part of Fedora, but it is not in the installer.

So, my disk contains:

2.4.22-1.2188.nptlBOOT/
  i386/
     ataraid.o
     medley.o
2.4.22-1.2188.nptl/
  i586/
     ataraid.o
     medley.o
  athlon/
     ataraid.o
     medley.o