Art Wildman said...

|In keeping with SL's "main goal... to have everything compatible with 
|Enterprise", I would point folks to the upstream vendor & focus on 
|listing what improvements you've made to support any additional hardware 
|in SL.

The USV doesn't appear to know what's compatible.

They have a list of supported hardware, but that
is defined by which vendors have paid them a fee
and either perforemd the tests on their hardware
and reported back, or paid the USV an additional
fee to perform the tests.  Hence the minimal list
purely of supprted systems-- not motherboards or
chipsets or cards, etc.

[The rest is a side note on how I know this and
a slight rant about USV support.]

I know this because I just had the conversation
ith the USV yesterday.  We have some licenses up
for renewal and are not sure we're going to renew.
Why?  Lack of support.  One of only two questions
I asked last year was whether a certain motherboard
or its chipset had kernel support or would in the
next release.  It took them *weeks* to get back to
me with a definitive answer, which I will reproduce
here in its entirety.  Normally I might fear this
was a contract violation, but not in this case:

   [We] do not support indivisual components and also
   do not support as well. However I discusssed the
   details of the mother board with my peers and found
   that the board is having a number of known issues
   with Linux.

Makes me right glad we paid $800 x 5 licenses.

[I had made it clear I just wanted to know whether
the kernel had or would support this board, not USV.]

Our system builder tested the board, and other than
the NIC driver (which we got readily from the mfr)
it has performed just fine for two months on 10
systems.

For anyone who cares. it's the Asus A8V E-SE with
SATA and PCIe.  The Marvell NIC has been the only
problem we have run into, and the sk98lin driver
installs fine.  (We do get a boot whine on the
304SDR kernel about missing symbols, but it still
works fine.)  We have Athlonn64s in these but so
far are running the 32 bit OS, FWIW.  We have
run these with both ATI and NVidia video cards.