Build problem

[Rick Stevens <rstevens@vitalstream.com>]

This is a repost, as I've not seen a response.  Feel free to respond
to me directly if it seems more appropriate.  I've done a bit of
updating too, as this ugly beast reared it's head on a second machine
this weekend.  This has been driving me nuts for days!  I need some
help!

This may or may not have been discussed.  Yesterday, I was building
2.4.14 (yes, a bit behind the time) for a system where the root
filesystem lives on a Symbios 53c8xx SCSI drive.  I built the system
as fully modularized (the root driver and such were modules).  When
I finally got around to building the initrd image, I noticed that
the scsi_mod.o and sd_mod.o drivers were NOT loaded into the ramdisk
image.

Hmmm, I said to myself.  I looked at the
/lib/modules/2.4.14/kernel/drivers/scsi directory and discovered that
scsi_mod.o and sd_mod.o weren't present!  Looking back at the source
tree, they had indeed been built.  Apparently the "make modules_install"
didn't move them to the /lib tree.  So I copied them manually,
re-depmoded it and re-built the initrd image.  This time, the scsi_mod
and sd_mod modules WERE inserted into the ramdisk image.  However, when
booting using that image, neither scsi_mod nor sd_mod are loaded.  The
sym53c8xx driver DOES load, but we have an instant panic because the
root filesystem can't be found.

ADDITION: Same bloody thing happened on a different machine where the
root filesystem lives on a dpt_i2o SCSI RAID module.

What am I doing wrong here?  Is "make modules_install" broken in 2.4.14?
Am I suffering from a short between the keyboard and floor?  For
further info, this is a baseline RedHat 7.1 system, but I want the
2.4.14 kernel (the virtual memory system seems to work better for
our purposes than that found in kernels <= 2.4.9 and no, I don't
want to get into a discussion about the merits of the aa and ac
VM systems).


P.S. I'm posting this to linux-kernel and linux-scsi.  Someone should
be able to tell me what I did wrong.

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- Rick Stevens, SSE, VitalStream, Inc.      rstevens@vitalstream.com -
- 949-743-2010 (Voice)                    http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-      Try to look unimportant--the bad guys may be low on ammo!     -
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