[Server-devel] CentOS hardware support doubts

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> However, having installed/run CentOS 6.2 for the first time I now have
> my doubts about this. I installed it on a server where the network
> interface does not appear with F9 (but does work with more recent
> Fedora). With CentOS, the same problem as F9 is presented: no network
> adapter.
>
> Digging further, I see that support was added to the Linux kernel for
> this particular network adapter (Atheros AR8152) on February 16th

I assume here that CentOS is reasonably in sync with RHEL. Does
http://elrepo.org/bugs/print_bug_page.php?bug_id=126 help? More
generally, does any of the external repos have a kmod-staging or
kmod-atl1e that works for you?

My assumption is that RHEL/CentOS have fairly decent hardware support
from backported drivers, some in the RH kernels, EPEL or external
repos (in order of decreasing quality expectations...).

I wonder if you've been unlucky in the mix of hw you got there; or
whether the driver support situation for essential things like NICs
and disk controllers is weaker than I had expected. Maybe others with
more practical experience with current RHEL/CentOS can comment...?

We should keep in mind that any LTS OS will have to rely on driver
packages and/or kernel updates to support current hw... of course we
want something reasonably sane and straightforward. But having to
handle some extra driver installs isn't in itself a big deal.

cheers,



m
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