My lab plans to DIY a computer with Pentium D 820 CPU. But it is said that those mainboards who support this CPU all have ICH7 and there are no linux kernel supporting ICH7. Is that right?

3x

It really depends on the functions in the ICH7 you need to support. At my last job, testing network interfaces on various OEM systems with Linux, I found that Suse 9.3, and Mandriva 2005 worked almost flawlessly on Pentium D based systems (including a souped up system with Dual NVIDIA SLI 6600 video cards and a Pentium D EE). Sata worked ok, and all the other basic i/o functions worked (IDE, USB, etc).

The only functions that I know aren't available to Linux at this time (and may never be available) are DRM related. See http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121027,00.asp for more info on the DRM saga.

I've also seen some patches to the latest kernel (2.6.14.2) to enable older PATA support in the piix driver, but for the most part, lib-ata should support both PATA and SATA devices. Not sure if these batches have been added, though.