| title: | grafting lm sensors 2 10 1 onto red hat kerne |
|
The kernel as distributed by Red Hat in RHEL4 update 4
(2.6.9-42.0.3) has got
an lm_sensors and i2c in there already but it is a very old version,
2.8.7. That is not new enough to support certain chips on new hardware,
particularly the w83792 sensor. Has anyone successfully
been able to patch the latest 2.10.1 lm_sensors against that
old kernel, and if so, how?
The lm-sensors project has two parts:
1) a userspace part, including the sensors(1) program and libsensors(3) library
2) the Linux kernel drivers for the i2c bus and sensor chips
We maintain the kernel drivers for the 2.6 series directly in Linus tree now.
The trouble is, youre using 2.6.9-something which does not contain support
for your device - not surprising since 2.6.9 is a few days over 2 years old
by now.
What was 2.6.9 in Linus tree and what Red HAt distributes are quite
different. They grab a lot of the newer patches from the newer kernels
but evidently not these ones. I guess I am just going to have to
open a ticket with Red Hat and ask them to include these into
their next version.
To support the w83792 sensor on that old kernel, someone will have to back-
port the current driver so that it works with 2.6.9. My guess is that you
will not get any volunteers to do this (not particularly interesting) work.
Although, it shouldnt be very hard for a decent C programmer to do it...
maybe that is you or someone you work with.
IF we do this we have to get the latest i2c as well as the latest
lm_sensors back-ported there, dont we?
Another option could be to upgrade to a newer kernel that does support the
device.
Not an option here because we are depending on Red Hat for security
updates on this kernel and thus want to leave the underlying kernel
as untouched as possible. This was possible in the 2.4 kernel series.
I cant believe we are the only site in this situation. There are a lot
of others that try to run with the enterprise kernels and it would
seem there should be quite a bit of interest in this.
Steve
In either case, you will need to upgrade from the 2.8.7 package of lm-sensors
to something much newer, which should be no problem.
Regards,
--
Mark M. Hoffman
mhoffman at lightlink.com
|
