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Comment by flyinghamster | Hacker News Reader

One thing that is souring me on RHEL+clones is Red Hat's habit of yanking drivers for SAS and SCSI controller cards. On my home file server, CentOS 7 is the end of the line unless I buy a new HBA.

Then there was the old Dell server at a customer's site that we were planning to use for a development/testing system. It had a perfectly functional PERC/4e RAID controller, but Red Hat yanked the driver in 7.0, never mind that Ubuntu Server works perfectly on the same hardware. We ended up picking up a cheap refurbished desktop to use as the development box.

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The driver loss has even caused problems for me working for Red Hat :-/ I had to build versions of virt-p2v on top of RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 so that our own customers could virtualize older physical machines with the HP/Compaq RAID controllers: http://oirase.annexia.org/virt-p2v/RHEL-7.3/

This is one reason I don't run RHEL on bare metal, but only on a VM(ware) host. I know it's not free, and not cheap, but I'd rather not hassle with issues like that.

ESXi is most definitely free if you can live without the enterprise features.

For example, in many setups a max of 8 cores per VM is sufficient, and IIRC there are no longer memory or storage limits for the free tier.

The web admin (which replaces phased out vCenter admin interface) is pretty decent. Between that and the cli you're sorted for most non-enterprise use cases.

But yeah, if you need vMotion and all the other orchestration features, the licensing is...far from free.

Indeed, I considered the idea of installing Ubuntu Server and then putting CentOS 7 into a KVM guest. In the end, just using a desktop machine for the testing system was more practical.

I would have been far happier if they retained the driver as an "unsupported" option with a warning during installation, rather than flat-out removing it.

Some examples would help. So far, any example of drivers disappearing that I encountered were due to quality issues.

The abovementioned PERC/4e is an example. The driver was deprecated in RHEL6, and gone in RHEL 7.

The card in my home server is an Intel SASUC8I reflashed with IT firmware, so it's equivalent to an LSI SAS1068E. The driver for that is listed as "deprecated" in 7.

Another is the 3ware 8000 series. We got a dead machine in recently for repair and were faced with either moving the RAID drives and card over to a new server chassis while being restricted to the EOL'd CentOS 5 or upgrading to CentOS 7 but being forced to buy a 9000 series card and rebuild the array.

Lose-lose.

Well, I can see why Red Hat wouldn't want to support those old cards forever. Including the driver would be easy, but actually supporting it (QA, support...) is not.

They already supported them for close to 10 years, which is much longer than most hardware lifecycles last nowadays (3-5 years).

You could still build a custom kernel but yeah.

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