Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 04:54:53 -0800 From: Maseed <assadbsd@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: sil3112a SATA Controller, current status Message-ID: <f8646080041118045410a4629c@mail.gmail.com>
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Hi, I've been trying to install FreeBSD on my system that has an onboard Silicon Image sil3112a SATA controller and a Western Digital Raptor WD740 74GB HD, for a few months now, with no luck. First I tried 5.2.1, which installs fine but starts to spew DMA timeout messages when put under any kind of HD related stress and eventually the system becomes totally unusable. I tried a second time with 5.3-BETA7, the behaviour was exactly the same. I was just browsing freebsd-current archives after a google.com search and happened upon this e-mail: <--quoted e-mail begin--> To: current@freebsd.org Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 22:06:40 +0200 (CEST) I have now found a way to reproduce the DMA problems some setups seems to be having with the SiI3112A SATA chip. Now, if I use real SATA drives, (and I mean real SATA drives, the WD Raptor fx is not a real SATA device but just a PATA device with a build in PATA->SATA converter chip) it works just fine no matter what I try. If however I use an older PATA drive and a certain PATA->SATA "dongle" (in this case 1 out of 4 samples) I can reproduce the problem pretty easily. This suggests to me that we are looking at a timing problem of sorts the question is where. I'll work on the problem as time permits... -S=F8ren=20 <--quoted e-mail end--> I have to point out in the above e-mail that the problem is not just confined to the 36GB Raptor, which might be a PATA drive with a Marvel chip to make it work with SATA drives, but it also plagues *real* native SATA drives as well, since the 74GB Western Digital Raptor I have is a true SATA150 drive with TCQ. Anyhow, I am wondering if this issue has been resolved yet or not, either in FreeBSD-current or 5.3-RELEASE-px. I don't want to discard my current OS to install FreeBSD only to find out that the problem is still there. If any sort of error logs or dmesg output is required by a potential developer from this setup of mine, I'll go so far as to resize my partition and install FreeBSD 5.3 and provide them, but the reason why I'm hesitant in doing that is the fact that I run a web-server on my computer that cannot stay down for long, as some friends of mine depend on it. Any feedback will be highly appreciated. Thank You, -Assad
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