Can anyone of you gurus provide a coherent (preferably reasonably detailed so that a newbie like myself could understand what the heck you are talking about) answer on how to patch a stock RedHat 9.0 (2.4.20-8 I believe) kernel to enable DMA on ViA VT8237 southbridge?

I am not even talking about this much-ballyhooed (by ViA, AMD and everyone else in this game) VT6420 SATA controller that is part of this southbridge – I don't believe anyone can actually describe how one is supposed to patch a kernel during installation to enable install on SATA drive.

With all these references to the gurus – Alan Cox, Vojtech Pavlik, Jeff Garzik – that have supposedly "resolved" all these issues, there is still no reference anywhere as to how a simple guy like myself can take simple ViA motherboard like Abit KV7 and install a simple RedHat 9.0 on it (either SATA or IDE). And yes, I am sure you'd understand that I would rather have it at DMA 6 than DMA 0, which is what RedHat defaults to during install.

Anyone cares to impress a novice (or maybe even a bunch of novices)?

Please see http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO/ and specifically: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOW...he_kernel.html . Using that framework, along with the install instructions should get you through most of it. However, I use MDK 9.1 and I didn't need to patch to get my chipset to work. I've tried to patch a multimedia kernel patch to my MDK, but I didn't have the right patch version for my kernel version, a most required item, they must match.
Have fun!