I finally managed to get all the relevant modules into an initrd this evening, and managed to upgrade from the SuSE 9.3 stock 2.6.11.4-21.13-bigsmp to the current rpm from SuSE 10.1, 2.6.16.21-0.13-bigsmp. The difference is immense. On excalibur, which is an IBM x335 with dual SCSI drives in a RAID1 mirror, I’ve gone from 2.4MB/sec to 69MB/sec.
A painless process, albeit made a little hairier by having to play ‘hunt-the-dependency’ with drivers in the initrd as LSI seem to have rejigged things since the old kernel.
If only I’d twigged it was a driver issue that was thwarting me sooner… at last I can type ‘ls’ without people whinging at me!
On the bright side, my VIA based dedicated server from BlackCat seems to be coping with the load of teamspeak plus 3 or 4 forums admirably.