[Server-devel] CentOS hardware support doubts

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

Like others, I'm interested in moving the XS to a newer OS base. My
key motivation for this is that the Foundation Zamora Teran (OLPC
Nicaragua) is having difficulty buying servers for new schools being
added to the project - Fedora 9 is too old to support this hardware.

For the next XS release, Martin suggests that CentOS 6.2 (or another
RHEL equivalent) is used as a base. As my contribution here will
likely be limited to just this rebase, I'm prepared to accept that
preference.

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,
2010. However, since CentOS 6.2 uses a kernel from 2009, it does not
support this hardware. This seems excessively old for a distro that
was released in December 2011, and I imagine that we will see many
such problems if we run with this.

With this in mind, is there still a strong preference to go with
CentOS, or would a more recent Fedora (e.g. 16/17?) be a better
choice?

Thanks,
Daniel