Re: Serial ATA Support - will it come?

[Charles Duffy <Charles_Duffy@messageone.com>]

Let's back up here a bit --

When you say "no disk was found at all" when using SCSI emulation, do 
you mean the kernel booted and was unable to find the hard drives, or 
did it not even get that far?

The SCSI emulation uses the sym53c8xx driver, which was first developed 
against 2.0.36; it's been in the kernel long enough that I'm certain 
whatever kernel you're using supports it (or it wouldn't run a modern 
userland either). I'm guessing you're running a monolithic kernel with 
only the drivers you need compiled in, instead of any vendor kernel (as 
any and every vendor kernel would have this driver available). Frankly, 
if you want to allow your users to boot their machines on other than 
your usual hardware, it's only sensible to have a kernel that supports 
the secondary hardware as well as what you normally provision them -- 
whether this secondary hardware is physical or virtual.

That said, there's a mechanism by which you can cheat: Boot the guest 
with an externally-provided kernel using -kernel and -append options to 
kvm. This isn't ideal -- you're no longer going through the guest's 
bootloader and so lose any settings included there -- but should be good 
enough for a rescue environment.