Help me patch a 2.6.5 Linux kernel

[Zelmo3]

I'm closer than ever to getting Linux installed on my striped Raptors. They're on a SiL 3112 SATA RAID controller, which has been a real PITA until I got Horsten's pre-compiled kernel module for Gentoo 1.4. Now I can run Gentoo's installation disk and load that module to access the array, but I'd like to use the 2.6.5 kernel in my system. Apparently it needs the "raiddetect" tool, which I downloaded. Seems to be a kernel patch (.diff file) that gets loaded by initrd. I did a dry-run with patch, and patch seemed to find all the targets except Makefile. Now there are Makefiles in many directories of the kernel tree, and I didn't see the diff file's other targets while looking through the tree, so I don't know which Makefile it's looking for.
So the question is how should I apply this patch to the 2.6.5 kernel, and once that's done do I need to do anything else to make sure it gets run in initrd before the kernel loads? I should mention that I've only used patch once, and I'm not sure it was entirely successful (though I got the result I wanted) so I'm a noob in this arena.

 

[drag]

It's a patch specificly for 2.6.5? And are you patching it against a vanilla 2.6.5 kernel or one that has been tweaked by Gentoo?

If you want you can read the diff file, or I think, look at the output of the command to see what file it was originally looking for, then find the one closest to it to run the patch on....

Also the newest kernel is 2.6.6, maybe it has the patch already incorporated into the newest kernel?

 

[Zelmo3]

The patch doesn't seem to be specific to any particular kernel; at least the web site doesn't give a certain version, and I don't see anything in the file itself to indicate that it's made for a certain version. Horsten just says it's a tool for the 2.6 kernels.
The kernel I got from Gentoo is a vanilla 2.6.5, and I just don't see in its source tree the files referenced by the diff (such as bios_medley.h for my controller, and bios_something.h for everything else except the Makefile).
Thanks for the link to the 2.6.6 changelog. I didn't find anything in there related to this raiddetect tool, medley modules, or my controller's chipset, so I'm still going to try this patch for now.