[elrepo] [el5 kernel] NIC and XHCI for Kaby Lake: feasibility

[Björn Gerhart]

> Hi Björn,
> 
> I am in a similar situation in that I have an EL5 system and have new hardware arriving shortly to replace it based upon a Skylake CPU and B150 chipset. However, I'll be doing a fresh RHEL7 installation on this.
> 
> EL5 is dead. Well, technically not quite as End of Life is officially 31st March next year, so it has 3 months life left. To that end, I would highly recommend your customer perform a fresh install of EL7 on his new hardware and migrate whatever he requires from his EL5 install, before the end of March.
> 
> Elrepo won't be undertaking any major work on EL5 now so won't be backporting support for that nic to EL5. I believe the reason it's not been updated for EL5 since Aug 2014 is that the upstream Intel source failed to compile against the older EL5 kernel some time back.
> 
> As I have similar hardware arriving soon, I can guarantee you I will be throwing all my resources at backporting anything required for EL7 on Skylake. I can confirm that RHEL7 already supports the Intel I219-V NIC 8086:15b8 device:
> 
> [phil at RHEL7 ~]$ grep -i 8086 /lib/modules/*/modules.alias | grep -i 15b8
> /lib/modules/3.10.0-514.2.2.el7.x86_64/modules.alias:alias pci:v00008086d000015B8sv*sd*bc*sc*i* e1000e
> /lib/modules/3.10.0-514.el7.x86_64/modules.alias:alias pci:v00008086d000015B8sv*sd*bc*sc*i* e1000e
> 
> 
> If your customer insists on sticking with EL5 then I'm afraid he's on his own.
> 
> As an aside, if you are able to give me a full 'lspci -nn' listing of the hardware, I can look in more depth as to what is natively supported and what still needs backporting.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Phil
> 

Hi Phil, thanks for your detailed reply and the clarification. It’s good to know that you already focus on Skylake. I agree that a near-EOL product is not a good base to rely on, so I highly appreciate your work on the EL7 support for that chipset!

Below you’ll find the lspci -nn list of the prototype board I’m operating on. It’s created on EL5 base, so it lacks the proper textual data of the devices. However, one of my next tasks will be installing EL7 on that platform anyway. So in turn I can test or verify functionality you maybe will backport.

Happy New Year!
Björn

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:591f] (rev 05)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:5912] (rev 04)
00:14.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a12f] (rev 31)
00:14.2 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a131] (rev 31)
00:15.0 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a160] (rev 31)
00:15.1 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a161] (rev 31)
00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a13a] (rev 31)
00:17.0 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a102] (rev 31)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a143] (rev 31)
00:1f.2 Memory controller [0580]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a121] (rev 31)
00:1f.3 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a170] (rev 31)
00:1f.4 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:a123] (rev 31)
00:1f.6 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:15b8] (rev 31)