Hi Andi, Andi Kleen wrote:
The SATA drivers in 9.2 are just a snapshot of the ones that were in the vanilla kernel at the time the release was frozen (there are some small exceptions to this, but in general it's true)
that's good to know. it means that if i get time i should just be able to patch something in from upstream.
Another issue is that motherboard and BIOS vendors often add bugs and quirks when they integrate chips, so it's often the case that even when there is a generic chipset driver for a specific chip available the bug workarounds needed to get the devices on a particular mainboard actually running may not be in yet etc.
i'd agree with this if earlier versions of the SuSE kernel didn't work on exactly the same hardware.
Problems can also be caused by poor cabling or other hardware issues. For example a newer driver may drive a HD more aggressively and then cause a marginary setup that barely worked before to fall over (this problem is fortunately much less severe in SATA than it was in PATA)
this may be a likely candidate. for the moment we've switched back to using a standard PATA drive since it doesn't show the same problems... peter