sata_sil on amd64

I have been stuck using kernel 2.6.4 for the last year or so for various 
reasons, and now I'm in a vicious catch-22.  If I don't upgrade, I can't use 
NPTL, therefore my system will continue to be susceptible to the 
sigqueue-overflow flaw in linuxthreads.  But if I do upgrade, problems in 

0.53 sata_sil implementations halt my system in a matter of minutes with 

dmesg entries about imaginary bad blocks.

0.53 probably has it's own flaws, but it's been rock-solid running a single 
drive on my computer for a year.  How feasible would it be to forward-port 
this version to a newer kernel, say 2.6.10?  If I fix the header problems 
could it work, or is .10 too structurally different from .4?