It sounds to me like it would be quite trivial to run Linux on this laptop, just by treating the "RAID" mode PCI ID like AHCI and employing the regular driver.

It sounds to me like it would be quite trivial to run Linux on this laptop, just by treating the "RAID" mode PCI ID like AHCI and employing the regular driver. I believe Linux supports forcing the use of a driver for a PCI device.