Hi, does someone have experience with SL (Pro or SLES) on the Thunder K8S Pro (S2882G3NR-D) (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8spro.html) together with an areca ARC-1160 (Intel IOP331 based) 16-port SATA RAID controller? Most of the components will work just fine, I just wonder about the on-board Sil3114 SATA and Intel IOP based RAID controllers. The manufacturer of the 16-port adapter claims Linux support (RH, SUSE) but which drivers are the correct ones? The Sil3314 should work with the sata_sil driver, right? When I installed my Asus A8V board I had to manually load libata and sata-via before firing up YaST during installation, I assume that's the same here. As for the ARC-1160, I have a certain idea after browsing the kernel source of my SL92 and SL93 machines (and googling all along, for sure). The machine in question will have all 16 disks attached to the 16-port controller, I can only assume that it should boot off this adapter too. The manufacturer seems to have drivers available on ftp://60.248.88.208/RaidCards/AP_Drivers/Linux/DRIVER/Suse-9.0-SLES-x86-64 and ../Suse-9.2-Professional-x86-64_Beta. Hmmm ... as it seems, the driver is _not_ contained in the standard kernel tree (as opposed to what the vendor says on http://www.areca.us/news/html/release_5_6_05.htm - "The Linux and FreeBSD driver have integrated in the kernel tree.") Which means my customer is tied to a specific kernel version, and loses the arcmsr driver on each YOU kernel update :-(( Hence, each kernel update would involve installing the most recent kernel source, integrating the arcmsr source code, modifying some source files, rebuilding and praying. SUSE: no support whatsoever. Andreas (Jaeger), any idea how we could help the customer in this case? Anyway - which distro should I be going for? SLES9 makes no sense IMHO because the machine is not certified hence no support in any case. SL92 is slightly more recent as far as the kernel, the rest is pretty much on the latest identical SUSE9-CORE level. Thanks for any hint! Ciao, hm -- Year, n.: A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"