HP/Compaq SmartArray series

1. Vendor information

Theses HP/Compaq cards are usually well supported on Linux.
HP supports Linux and provide an opensource kernel driver which has been part of Linux for ages.

2. Linux kernel drivers

There is only one drivers to handle all cards:

Driver	Supported cards
cciss	All SmartArray

You should not expect any problems with theses drivers which are known to be mature and stable.
We don't know any current Linux distrubtion which miss theses drivers so no additional step should be required to get it working.

However this driver doesn't you the regular SCSI stack, so don't expect to find your logical drives as /dev/sdX.
Here is an example:

vmware:~# ls -lah /dev/cciss/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     160 2008-08-28 14:36 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root    3,1K 2008-08-28 14:36 ..
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104,  0 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d0
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104,  1 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d0p1
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104,  2 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d0p2
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104,  3 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d0p3
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104, 16 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d1
brw-rw----  1 root disk 104, 17 2008-08-28 14:36 c0d1p1

/dev/c0d0 means logical drive 0 on controller 0. /dev/c0d0p1 means first partition of logical drive 0 on controller 0.
In exemple /dev/sda is /dev/c0d0 here. /dev/sdb1 is /dev/c0d1p1.