[Server-devel] CentOS hardware support doubts

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Martin Langhoff
> <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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?
>
> I've returned that system now; if I get the time and opportunity to
> test again, I will do so. Where is the list of external repos?
>
> I'm worried about the expertise required in order to identify such
> repos and packages. We need this process to be doable without me in
> the room.
>
>> 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 assume that RHEL is pretty good for server-class hardware found in
> US/EU; I can imagine why the support of desktop-class hardware found
> in the poorer parts of latin america may be lesser so.
>
>> 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...?
>
> I've now seen 3 failure cases - the AR8152 mentioned above, and
> another case which I only had time to do a quick boot check of
> F9/C6/F16 (F16 was the only one that recognised the onboard NIC of the
> asrock motherboard).
>
> Yesterday we received 10 servers based on an Intel motherboard (and 12
> more will be coming next week). F9 doesn't recognise the onboard NIC.
> C6 recognises the onboard NIC but isn't able to send/receive packets.
> F16 works fine (using e1000e driver). As these boards only have 1 PCI
> socket it is not possible to have 2 NICs (unless we resort to USB...)
> unless we move beyond C6.
> Also, F9 and C6 do not recognise the SATA DVD drive in these systems -
> no /dev/sr0 created, error in dmesg during boot. This will be a pain
> for field work. With F16 this works fine.
>
> I haven't yet found a case where the F9-->C6 upgrade adds hardware
> support for any hardware that we have here.
>
>
> I like your idea of using a F16 kernel on top of CentOS 6.2. So far,
> his seems to be working fine (and solves all of the compatibility
> problems mentioned above). If this continues to work I would like to
> push it as the default for XS install media.

I suggest using the F-15 kernel. The 2.6.42.x kernel in F-15 is the
3.2.x kernel but there's issues with a number of utilises plain not
working because they can't work out the kernel version because they
don't expect a major version of 3.

Peter