I was excited when kernel 2.6.15 arrived with libata support for the Marvell MV88SX5040 chipset – found on many motherboards like the SuperMicro P4SCT+. My excitement however was shortlived as it wouldn’t actually boot with CentOS. This morning I was greeted with news that 2.6.17 was released so I downloaded and tried again and was shocked (really shocked) that it worked!
So everyone dealing with patched and re-patched drivers from Adaptec that stopped working in 2.6.14 thanks to changes to the main SCSI module in the Linux Kernel, you can now upgrade your boxes and run the latest kernel with native SATA support.