Manually enabling a PCI-X card

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

What follows may sound simple to someone (I hope). During the past few
iterations of Fedora & Red Hat the automated process of hardware device
discovery / driver installation has gotten so good that I seem to have
forgotten how to do it manually.

I recently purchased a 4-port eSATA card for my SuperMicro server
running RHEL5. For details see
http://www.cooldrives.com/saii3g4espcc.html.

Unfortunately this card isn't identified during RHEL5u3 boot-time
discovery. According to the above web page, this card is based on the
Silicon Image Sil3124 chipset. According to
http://www.linux-ata.org/driver-status.html there's an open-source
driver available called sata_sil24.ko. It's supported by RHEL5u3, so I
entered:

        # insmod /lib/modules/2.6.18.128.1.10.el5/kernel/drivers/ata/sata_sil24.ko

It apparently loads normally:

        # lsmod | grep sil24
        sata_sil24             50373  0
        libata                208721  2 sata_sil24,sata_nv

I even remembered to add it to /etc/modprobe.conf:

        alias scsi_hostadapter2 sata_sil24
        
OK... I've physically found a 64-bit PCI-X slot (last one!) and
installed the card. I've identified its chipset, found a supported Linux
driver for that chipset, and installed it as a module. So far so good.
What's the problem? Where's the beef? When I now run:

        # lspci -v

there's no evidence that the card is now active even with the driver
installed. What step(s) have I forgotten?

--Doc


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