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Intel ICH5 / ICH5-R family chips —
fakeraid. (See fakeraid support details under Intel ICH6.) Supported in 2.4.22 and later kernels using drivers/ide's piix driver (but that driver locks up in many cases), and also (much more reliably) in libata's ata_piix driver, production quality since 2004-02-25. Intel ICH5/ICH6 is an open-standard hardware spec. ICH7/8 usually can be set to be backwards-compatible. "Enhanced mode" or "SATA-only mode" may need to be set in BIOS.
Intel produced GPLed patch sets for ICH5 in the 2.4.9 and 2.4.20 kernels of (respectively) Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 and Red Hat Linux 8.0, available for download as part of its driver set for the 6300ESB I/O Controller Hub South Bridge on its E7520 and 875P motherboard chipsets.
Adaptec has released a proprietary "aarich" driver (source code wrapper surrounding a binary-only core library) for Intel ICH5-R and Silicon Image 3512. (The name is intended to be parsed as AAR-ICH, as it is intended for certain Adaptec AAR-series cards based on Intel ICH5 SATA-I chips.)
Supermicro's ftp site offers proprietary drivers for Intel ICH5-R chips on Intel Hance Rapids motherboards, written by Adaptec.
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Intel ICH6 / ICH6-R / ICH6-M family SATA-I chips —
fakeraid. libata's ata_piix driver support is now (2004-02-25) functional when the ICH6 is running in either ICH5-alike mode or (on ICH6-R or ICH6-M) the enhanced, much-faster, open-specification "AHCI" mode (entry for which, please see), as of 2004-07-08.i ICH6 and AHCI are both open-standard hardware specs. If your desired installation kernel lacks the "ahci" driver, you may be able to use ICH5-like fallback mode: Look in your BIOS Setup program for a "legacy" or "ATA" setting, e.g., as reported by Peter Knaggs for his Dell Dimension XPS Gen 3 Series / Intel 925X Express chipset motherboard.
Note that as of 06/2004, Silicon Image chipsets have a bug in "lba48" addressing (of a few drives over 137GB, but not all of them), necessitating a patch that will, as a necessary consequence, limit performance on the drives affected (only).
Alternatively, LSI has produced proprietary, binary-only drivers (source code wrapper accompanying a "megaide" binary-only driver) for ICH6-R. Supermicro's ftp site offers versions of those same proprietary, binary-only drivers.
Intel ICH5-R, ICH6-R, and perhaps some others perform RAID0 disk-spanning via a BIOS trick, which is thus OS-independent. That mode of Intel fakeraid (Intel Software RAID) can be supported in 2.4.x on ICH5/6 with ataraid subdriver iswraid atop libata's ata_piix (not atop drivers/ide):
http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20031201_243.html#16,
http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20040331_255.html#16. (The iswraid patch will be merged into kernel 2.4.28; it and related patches/info are available at
http://iswraid.sourceforge.net/.)
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Intel ICH7 / ICH7-R SATA-II chips —
fakeraid. Should work with either libata's ata_piix driver or libata's ahci driver. (Please see entries for ICH5, ICH6, and AHCI.)
Supermicro's ftp site offers proprietary drivers for Intel ICH7-R, written by Adaptec.
