I'm a happy owner of a Asus A7V8X motherboard. It's an athlon VT400 board with integrated audio, network (not the gigabit version), firewire, 6 x usb 2.0 (the real one,high-speed) and a Promise Serial ATA RAID controller.
Update
I currently use this controller with kernel 2.6 and it works with driver sata_promise. See at the bottom of this page. Some of this text was written a while back and I don't really feel like re-writing. Read on, you can probably make sense of it.
Getting the controller working
Because of proprietary code Promise can't make all the details of this controller available, so there where no drivers for a while. Some binary drivers appeared from Promise for a couple of distributions (mainly SuSE). This was also only for the distributed kernels, so it was of no help. For one, I compile my own kernels, and on top of that I use debian.
The other day browsing the debian-user mailing list I stumbled upon this post asking for help on the controller. I followed the link to the page and found a compilable driver. This includes a proprietary binary part, so it will taint your kernel. I hope I'm not breaking any laws by mirroring it here.
Kernel 2.4
The driver worked fine on my debian system running kernel 2.4.21. The array is detected as /dev/sda. You can take a look my kernel config in case it might help you out. Just remember to enable scsi and scsi disks.
To install the driver do the following:
download the driver zip
- unzip the driver (unzip ft-par_v1.00.0.15.zip)
- enter the directory created (cd par15)
- read the readme (less README)
- make sure your kernel sources are in /usr/src/linux (or make sure that /usr/src/linux points to your kernel source tree, i.e. /usr/src/linux-2.4.21)
- change the Makefile if you need to, highly unlikely.
- run a make (make)
- copy the driver/module to an appropriate location (cp ft3xx.o /lib/modules/2.4.21/kernel/drivers/scsi/)
- add ft3xx.o to /etc/modules if you want the driver to be loaded at boot time. This might be different by distro but a very good initial guess.
- you should now be able to load the driver with insmod (insmod ./ft3xx.o). If you run depmod (depmod -a) you can load it with no path. You should reboot your computer to make sure everything is loaded correctly on boot.
There are a few extra things that you may need. You need to define an array when the computer boots and add drives to it. The controler only accepts one drive (as master) on the ATA channel. I don't have Serial ATA drives to test but AFAIK you need them configured as Master. In my case I wanted to share some information with a windows partition (since I don't really leave space for an OS I don't use that much on my other drives). Windows asked me to define a drive of sorts before I was able to partition. I don't know if this is a needed step or just a Windows requirement. Windows only allowed me to format in NTFS which doesn't work for me, I needed FAT. On Linux I was able to access /dev/sda just fine.
I'm writting this from memory so I hope it's accurate. Let me know if something is wrong or needs updating.
Kernel 2.6
I've stopped using the Promise controller for IDE drives, so I don't really know how it performs in that arena. Last time I tried it wasn't working.
I currently use it with a SATA drive and it works perfectly. The drive you need to load is sata_promise. The drive will show up as /dev/sdX (/dev/sda in my case). This is my current output with debian kernel 2.6.16-1-686.
SCSI subsystem initialized libata version 1.20 loaded. sata_promise 0000:00:08.0: version 1.03 ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:08.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 185 ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF0AA0200 ctl 0xF0AA0238 bmdma 0x0 irq 185 ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF0AA0280 ctl 0xF0AA02B8 bmdma 0x0 irq 185 ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0) scsi0 : sata_promise ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113) ata2: dev 0 cfg 49:2f00 82:346b 83:7f01 84:4003 85:3469 86:3c01 87:4003 88:203f ata2: dev 0 ATA-6, max UDMA/100, 488397168 sectors: LBA48 ata2: dev 0 configured for UDMA/100 scsi1 : sata_promise Vendor: ATA Model: WDC WD2500JD-00K Rev: 08.0 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05 SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB) sda: Write Protect is off sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB) sda: Write Protect is off sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back sda: sda1 sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda
Redhat
For the people using redhat, there is a thread about this at http://LinuxQuestions.org: Promise 376 (Asus A7V8X) and RedHat 9.0