Some elrepo kmod packages will no longer be available for RHEL 8.10 and 9.4

Red Hat are due to release RHEL point release updates 8.10 and 9.4 shortly.

Red Hat have made changes to the way they handle device drivers that are deprecated, disabled and unmaintained.

* Considerations in adopting RHEL 8: Chapter 11. Hardware enablement

* Considerations in adopting RHEL 9: Chapter 13. Hardware enablement

The way that Red Hat have implemented these changes in the 8.10 and 9.4 releases means that the ELRepo Project will no longer be able to re-enable device IDs in our kmod packages for devices that have been disabled in the RHEL kernel.

Affected kmod packages are:

kmod-aacraid
kmod-megaraid_sas
kmod-mlx4
kmod-mpt3sas
kmod-qla2xxx

* ELRepo bug tracker #1440 (EL-8)
* ELRepo bug tracker #1439 (EL-9)

What are my options?

If you are using an affected device on RHEL or compatible, there are a couple of options.

1. AlmaLinux have reverted these changes in their Enterprise Linux kernel so should be unaffected and support for these devices should be enabled by default.

2. Use an alternative kernel with native support enabled for your older hardware device. The ELRepo Project provides kernel-lt and kernel-ml packages which should natively support these older hardware devices. Other distributions may also ship their own kernel offerings.

Thank you,

The ELRepo Team

Note added on 2024-05-01: It was pointed out to us that the changes made in RHEL 9.4 would only apply to in-kernel modules. Therefore external kernel modules provided by kmods are not affected.