FYI: Fedora core 2135 and VIA (Southbridge 8237) SATA

[Simon at the Threshold]

Ok history so far..

Installed latest 2135 kernel and although on boot it noticed and 
assigned a scsi device to my Maxtor 80 gig SATA drive (via southbridge 
8237 controller) it was not visible from the O/S. So anything todo with 
sda/sda1 was invalid.

Since this is the closest I ever got to getting SATA support I played 
around and found an older Fedora kernel (2129) which somebody had very 
kindly patched in the libata code.  Same versions as the latest Fedora 
core (0.81) and this worked <Cheer>.

However since the output for both boots was identical I had a further 
play and managed to get the current fedora kernel (2135) working.

Initially I had it down to a problem with some of the kernel modules I'd 
had loaded (currently I have NVIDIA,VMware and ati_remote loaded) but 
with a little more playing I came to the conclusion that it probably 
wasn't anything specific with the modules themselves but a timing issue?.

So now I have a system where my SATA drive appears to the O/S most of 
the time. Can normally get it visible within 2/3 reboots from cold. 
Normally first time on a warm start..

Better than no support at all but still a tad annoying..

Regards
Simon