There were significant changes in RHEL 8.10 and 9.4. Drivers for legacy hardware are being disabled in the kernel. That’s not immediately a problem for you. But Red Hat has implemented a change that prevents them from being re-enabled later.

ELRepo writes in »Some elrepo kmod packages will no longer be available for RHEL 8.10 and 9.4« on elrepoproject.blogspot.com

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.

This announcement raises concerns. Thanks to the diversity of Linux distributions, we can keep working hardware in use longer instead of prematurely discarding it. This protects the environment and provides access to affordable hardware. Moreover, Red Hat may be violating one of the four open-source freedoms1. The freedom to use software must not be artificially restricted.

The text was automatically translated from German into English. The German quotations were also translated in sense.

  1. Definition of the vier Freiheiten by the FSFE. ↩︎