Re: Who can backport the AHCI driver to older kernels

[Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@it.uu.se>]

Rainer Koenig writes:
 > Hi Mikael,
 > 
 > Am Dienstag, 3. Juni 2008 14:07 schrieb Mikael Pettersson:
 > > Redhat seems to regularly backport the entire libata layer
 > > to at least 2.6.18 (RHEL5) and maybe also 2.6.9 (RHEL4).
 > 
 > Yes indeed we get perfect support from both Red Hat and SUSE for their 
 > enterprise level distribution. I already got a driver kit for the 
 > SLES10 kernel. The problem is that the targeted market is not willing
 > to use enterprise level (which means spend money for subscription) 
 > distros. They go for the "free" (as in free beer) distros and suffer 
 > from missing drivers. 

a) the RHEL sources are freely available
b) lots of people and organisations grab, tweak, and build them
   (including I might add many HPC sites using perfctr)
c) there's at least one no-cost binary redistribution (CentOS)
d) it's also easy to combine e.g. FC user-space with a
   self-compiled RHEL kernel, at least as long as they're
   closely matched (e.g. FC6 + RHEL5 is fine)
   (heck, I've even run FC6 on top of a SLES10.1 kernel)

So everything's that's needed is out there.