Update Feb 2008: Since the creation of this page, 3ware has released an official driver diskette image for RHEL 5.0, which could be used in place of my driver disc below.

Also, CentOS 5.1 and, I believe, 4.5 kernels now contain support for the 9650se.

March 2007:

Unfortunately, the 3w-9xxx linux kernel module didn't get support for the 3ware 9650se controller until 2.6.19 and the RHEL5/CentOS5 kernel is based on 2.6.18. And although it looks like RHEL4.5's kernel may get a backported driver update to add 9650se support, the 2.6.18-8 kernel does not contain a backport for 9650se support.

I've taken 3ware's updated 3w-9xxx driver for 2.6.18 (driver version 2.26.06.002-2.6.18) with 9650se support from their 9.4.0.1 support disc and compiled it for the CentOS 5 Beta kernel and the RHEL5 2.6.18-8 kernel and created a Driver Disk in ISO format. I also included the drivers from 3ware's rhel4.4/centos4.4 driver disk. I've tested this with the Centos 5 Beta installer. I don't have access to RHEL5, and CentOS 5 Final is not released yet, so I have not yet tested it with RHEL5/CentOS 5. However, I believe that there is a good chance that it will work, until 3ware releases an official driver disk for RHEL5/CentOS5.

Here are the kernels supported by this driver disk:

2.6.18-1.2747.el5 i686
2.6.18-1.2747.el5 x86_64
2.6.18-1.2747.el5PAE i686
2.6.18-1.2747.el5xen i686
2.6.18-1.2747.el5xen x86_64
2.6.18-8.el5 i686
2.6.18-8.el5 x86_64
2.6.18-8.el5PAE i686
2.6.18-8.el5xen i686
2.6.18-8.el5xen x86_64
2.6.9-42.EL i686
2.6.9-42.EL x86_64
2.6.9-42.ELhugemem i686
2.6.9-42.ELsmp i686
2.6.9-42.ELsmp x86_64

Contact: jason3ware [at] truedesign [dot] org