Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 10:43:24 +0200 (SAST) From: Willie Viljoen <will@highveldcs.com> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Per-drive ATA configuration? (fwd) Message-ID: <20020612104259.H252-100000@phoenix.vh.laserfence.net>
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Hi, I've recently set my system up in a rather perculiar way, the mainboard (an Asus P3V133) has an onboard ATA-66 controller of some VIA flavour. I have a CMD-469 ATA-100 controller lying around, which was needed to run my 40GB drive on an older motherboard. I can boot directly off the 649, but the problem with this is that ATA_STATIC_ID option turned on, then lists the drive as ad4, which means at boot time, the system keeps probing for ad0, and my bootup is basically stalled for about 60 seconds while the ata driver tries to get around the fact that I have no ad0. For this reason, I've reenabled the ATA-66 controller, and connected an old drive (Conner Peripherals 425MB) to it. The conner now holds root partitions for all my OSs, and the rest is installed on the 40GB, controlled by the ATA-100. This is also a slow boot, due to the lack of speed on the conner's part, but is significantly faster than waiting for drivers looking for a drive which is just not there. I could just run the 40GB off the ATA-66, but I'm greedy in terms of speed, and don't see why I should run at ATA-66 if my drive is ATA-100 capable. The problem now is that under very heavy load, like installing a new world or kernel etc into the root partition, the little conner freeses up. I've tried with different drives, all give the same problem (A 210MB Seagate, a 1.7GB Seagate, and an 800MB Western Digital) The machine goes into a hard lock and simply refuses to budge after the lockup, no kernel panic output or even log messages to go by. Infact, it does not even respond to ctrl+alt+delete, the soft power off sequence, or even the ATX power switch on my case. The only way to get it out of this lock is switching off the wall socket and switching it back on again. After some testing, I noticed that the conner is running at WDMA2. I found this strange, since the conner is a very old drive, and I doubt it was built for DMA, even if it was, I doubt wether they had the specs completely right back in 1994. Upon disabling ATA DMA completely, I found that the conner loses no speed at all, and the problem seems to be gone. From this it is rather evident that these old drives should not be making an attempt at DMA. The problem now is that ATA is disabled accross my entire system, meaning I have to read the 40GB at PIO4, which, obviously, is less than desirable. This has me to the point of simply wanting to remove the ATA-100 controller and using the ATA-66, but I'm usually not keen on just giving up. I checked the ata(4) manpage, and they mentioned a sysctl called hw.atamodes. This sysctl (aparently) allows for individual tuning of ATA parameters. However, to my great dismay, I discovered that this sysctl does not exist on my system (FreeBSD 4.6-RC) I've tried having sysctl display all its opaque variables, and this sysctl still simply isn't there. I tried setting it from loader.conf asif it were a kernel tunable, again, to no avail. Has this controle been removed from the ata driver? Or has it simply not yet been implimented... Either of those cases being true, is there any way anyone can think of in which I could individually tune my ATA devices, short of downgrading or going to 5.0-CURRENT? Regards, Will -- Willie Viljoen Highveld Computing Solutions 214 Paul Kruger Avenue Universitas Bloemfontein 9321 South Africa +27 51 522 15 60, a/h +27 51 522 44 36 +27 82 404 03 27 will@highveldcs.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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