Greetings,

Dual Opteron with Supermicro H8DAR-T mobo including Adaptec Marvell
Hercules 2 SATA hardware RAID controller (MV88SX6041 4-port
SATA II PCI-X Controller); 2 disks. We have no other 64-bit machine.

SciLx can't see anything on that SATA disk controller without the
aar81xx.rhel4qu1.x86_64.img driver from supermicro.
But that locks the box into SL4.1 & kernel 2.6.9-11.

It's said that sata_mv driver, which should support MV88SX6041, is in
later SL kernels - yes, it's in 2.6.9-42  -
but yum update this box's kernel to 2.6.9-42 & try to boot -
no joy, no drives seen.
Is there a way to have this box use a later kernel, by some simple
yum upgrade/update, that frees us from the aar81xx.rhel4qu1 driver?
(rhel4qu1 is the latest version there is)

(total novice at initrd / kernel compile stuff; pointers to
very straightfoward howto are welcome)

Is there truth to the rumor that the sata_mv driver does not
support MV88SX6041, or does not support it well?

There is some howto w.r.t this wretched SATA ctrlr for FC3/4 which
is helpful but complicated (to me). 
It's said FC5 works out-of-the-box with this wretched SATA Ctrlr.


The 40Rolling x86_64 is 2.6.9-42 but there are no ISOs yet.
(Plus, we'd be a bit nervous of using Rolling.)
All the rest are at best 2.6.9-34 but no sata_mv there.

Grateful for help.



PS Global applause to Troy Dawson, Connie Sieh, & all the rest of
the SL crew. SL is an awesomely pleasant OS to use & support.
You deserve some sort of global recognition!!