CentOS - Feb 2009 - AHCI support in CentOS 5.2?

My friend has an external sata hard disk, and likes the hot-plug feature. 
However, that works only if the appropriate sata setting in the motherboard 
bios is set to AHCI (IDE compatibility and RAID are two other options, but 
hot-plugging doesn't work with them). The machine has WinXP atm, while Linux
is about to be installed in the following couple of days.

Now, on wikipedia I read that AHCI is supported starting from kernel 2.6.19 
and later, while current CentOS 5.2 has 2.6.18. Is it possible to make AHCI  
work under 2.6.18 or should I install Fedora instead?

Fedora will become obsolete in a year or so, and I will not be around to 
reinstall it again for him, so I would prefer a long-term solution (CentOS). 
But  I need to be sure that it can be made to do all that fancy 
hot-plug-auto-mount-sata-ahci stuff without too much hassle.

Oh, btw, I am talking about hot-plugging using the sata cable --- usb 
connection of course already works, but this is a hard disk and speed 
increase is highly nontrivial when using sata connection compared to usb.

Any suggestions?

Thanks! :-)
Marko

On 02/08/2009 10:57 AM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> My friend has an external sata hard disk, and likes the hot-plug feature.
> However, that works only if the appropriate sata setting in the motherboard
> bios is set to AHCI (IDE compatibility and RAID are two other options, but
> hot-plugging doesn't work with them). The machine has WinXP atm, while
Linux
> is about to be installed in the following couple of days.
>
> Now, on wikipedia I read that AHCI is supported starting from kernel 2.6.19
> and later, while current CentOS 5.2 has 2.6.18. Is it possible to make AHCI
> work under 2.6.18 or should I install Fedora instead?
AFAIK, Centos5 (RHEL5) has support for this in kernel.

$grep SATA /boot/config-2.6.18-92.el5
CONFIG_SATA_AHCI=m
>
> Fedora will become obsolete in a year or so, and I will not be around to
> reinstall it again for him, so I would prefer a long-term solution
(CentOS).
> But  I need to be sure that it can be made to do all that fancy
> hot-plug-auto-mount-sata-ahci stuff without too much hassle.
>
> Oh, btw, I am talking about hot-plugging using the sata cable --- usb
> connection of course already works, but this is a hard disk and speed
> increase is highly nontrivial when using sata connection compared to usb.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks! :-)
> Marko
>
>
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> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Hi,

I use a sata rack at work, on C5.2, ahci works fine. It has been
backported (as several other things that appeared after 2.6.18).
hotplug works too.
Laurent