Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 17:39:53 -0400 From: Ron Dzierwa <RonDzierwa@comcast.net> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org, "=?iso-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren?= Schmidt" <sos@freebsd.dk>, FreeBSD@keyslapper.org Subject: Intel ICH5 SATA 150 disk controller support? (Louis LeBlanc) Message-ID: <414DFCA9.BBDEADC8@comcast.net>
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Lou, if people would stop slapping Soren on the back, and telling him what a wonderful job he's doing, and, instead, require him to make his driver work, i think we would all be better off. Its not uncommon for him to drop support for something that seemed to work previously just because he can't get his "crappy" (to use Soren's own term) driver working! It seems that if he can't seem to figure out a particular piece of hardware, it becomes the hardware's problem, and he then refers to it as a "crappy chipset", or a "broken bios" (regardless of how many other drivers/os's seem to work just fine with the same hardware.). Meanwhile, the rest of the FreeBSD community seem to think he's doing a spectacular job and tell you that you don't have to use FreeBSD!! Don't even try to suggest a fix, or offer help debugging a problem. It seems that either his arrogance is far beyond accepting help, or he's genuinely afraid that the house of cards he calls a driver really will fall apart. I recommend that, if you ANY sata controller working with ANY release of FreeBSD, you stick with it. Even the ones that he claims work don't really perform that all that well under load. After several weeks of struggling with the sata controller on my tyan s2875s, i went out and bought a promise pci sata controller. It doesn't crash, but is doesn't run all that fast either. I wanted to stack the drives in a raid configuration to take advantage of their speed. Each drive is capable of 50-60 meg/second continuous. If i put two together, i get 80-90 when i add a third, i get 75!!! All the while, the cpu seems to spend an awful lot of time in the kernel (top tells me that system time is about 30%!!)!!! Oddly enough, "crappy" old XP doesn't seem to have a problem saturating the pci bus - with 3 drives I get 120. The fourth drive doesn't seem to add much more, which is what i would expect with pci/32. Additionally, the onboard SiI chip works fine with Windoze or Linux. The excuse here is that the people at Silicon Image don't provide enough information about their chips for Soren to create a good driver. Ok, maybe not, but i would have expected the VIA chip on the promise controller to work, since it's part of the supported hardware. What i didn't expect was that FreeBSD would perform so badly, but i guess i should have based on previous experience with the ata driver. So much of FreeBSD is so far ahead of anything it seems such a shame that so critical of a part be so poorly done. sorrry, just had to vent i suppose... ron.
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