Xenial Kernel times out with recent Areca RAID controllers, kernel 4.5 has updated driver

[Martin Koniczek]

Hello Xenial Team,

recent Areca RAID controllers, e.g. ARC-1882ix-24, still have severe
issues with the arcmsr driver version v1.30.00.04-20140919 (either
access to the RAID devices is lost right away, or after hours or days,
usually involving timeout issues). The buggy driver is part of the
vanilla linux kernel for a long time, and still present in 4.4.

But it seems that - finally! - Areca got a recent driver
(v1.30.00.22-20151126) integrated into the mainline kernel 4.5 - and
tests here with an ARC-1882-ix-24 look promising so far.

According to kernel.org, the fix only affects two files: arcmsr.h and
arcmsr_hba.c, and on a first glance, I didn't see anything in
arcmsr_hba.c which would prevent backporting to 4.4

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/drivers/scsi/arcmsr/arcmsr.h?id=v4.5&id2=v4.4
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/drivers/scsi/arcmsr/arcmsr_hba.c?id=v4.5&id2=v4.4

Can the Xenial team consider to backport above diffs from 4.5 into 4.4,
similar to the backporting of radeon and amdgpu (yet much simpler?)

This would not only allow ARC-188x to work properly with Xenial
out-of-the-box, it should also add support for the (somewhat popular?)
ARC-1203 series

Thanks for your consideration,
	Martin