Hi Greg and Sarah, First, thank you both for replying so promptly. I'm still here at work hunched over my keyboard (surrounded by new hardware) wondering what to do.. ;-) [Sarah said...] >It's going to be pretty hard to port all 1000+ xHCI patches to the >2.6.27 kernel. I had to touch parts of the USB core as well as adding >the drivers, so can't just take the xHCI driver files alone. [Greg said....] >It's a _very_ difficult task, and in the end, you have a kernel that no one will >support (company or community), and does not even work for some corner cases. Well that convinces me! Thanks for steering me off this awful path early. In a way, I'm relieved. Btw, the OEM is Symantec. I do petition for better Linux support, but I think my use cases aren't very mainstream so they aren't too compelling. USB3 support however, I do however consider to be a no brainer considering it's potential. Kind Regards, Ian./ -----Original Message----- From: Greg KH [mailto:gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: 07 August 2012 19:07 To: Ian Atkin Cc: Sarah Sharp; 'linux-usb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: Re: Backfilling USB-3 support into the 2.6.27.7 kernel On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 10:49:00AM -0700, Sarah Sharp wrote: > On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 05:44:34PM +0000, Ian Atkin wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Don't know if this is the right place to ask about USB 3 support and > > legacy kernels, so apologies in advance if it is not. I have an > > ageing Linux environment based on the OpenSuse 2.6.27.7 kernel. This > > environment is an OEM environment which we occasionally have to > > back-fill support into (new AHCI drivers for example[1]) to get new > > hardware supported. > > > > The Intel xhCI (USB3) controller problem has now hit us with this > > environment, and I'm unsure whether support can be added for this > > old kernel is going to be possible. Upgrading the kernel will also > > take us out of OEM support. > > > > Does anyone have any pointers on what we can do here? If a kernel > > upgrade is the only way to go, resulting in us falling out of OEM > > support, then so be it. But before going down that route, I'd > > thought I'd ask... > > It's going to be pretty hard to port all 1000+ xHCI patches to the > 2.6.27 kernel. I had to touch parts of the USB core as well as adding > the drivers, so can't just take the xHCI driver files alone. > > I would strongly recommend you just upgrade your kernel. As someone who ended up doing the backport for USB3 to the 2.6.32 kernel (an even newer one than 2.6.27), I completely agree with Sarah here. It's a _very_ difficult task, and in the end, you have a kernel that no one will support (company or community), and does not even work for some corner cases. Just upgrade to a newer kernel version, it's the only way to reliably get this working properly. And what OEM is based on an unsupported openSUSE kernel? That seems pretty crazy. Good luck, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
