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Date:      Tue, 16 Mar 2004 16:29:38 -0800 (PST)
From:      Doug Ambrisko <ambrisko@ambrisko.com>
To:        Palle Girgensohn <girgen@pingpong.net>
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Backporting S-ATA driver SiI 3112a to FreeBSD-STABLE?
Message-ID:  <200403170029.i2H0Tcwd014909@ambrisko.com>
In-Reply-To: <6700000.1079144421@palle.girgensohn.se>

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Palle Girgensohn writes:
| I've received a bunch of ASUS A7N8X-E deluxe together with Serial ATA hard 
| disks. I had planned to run 4.9 on this combo, but it seems the Serial ATA 
| support for this driver does not exist before 5.x or so. The controller is 
| a SiI 3112a from Silicon Image.
| 
| Is there any chance of backporting this driver to -STABLE? At a glance, it 
| seems like a lot of work?
| 
| We will use these machines as developer workstations, and need them to have 
| the same major FreeBSD revision as our customer servers, so we must really 
| run FreeBSD 4.x. Hence, I have two choices, either backporting the SiS 
| 3112a driver from -CURRENT, or trying to get the store to accept trading 
| the harddisks for plain old parallel ATA ones.
| 
| Also, I've read a few pretty bad judgements about this controller from some 
| individuals. Is this true in any way?
| 
| Suggestions and input appreciated.

You might consider this as a base:
	http://www.ambrisko.com/doug/ata/ata_stable_sata.patch

It's not fully done.  The Intel SATA support is getting better for
the 6300ESB ICH.  The ICH5 SATA should work like the 6300ESB but I
haven't tested it.  The Promise SATA support is solid in our testing.
Hot swap works well.  I've been spending a lot of time in this area.

BTW a failure mode in the SATA spec. says freeze (ie. lock up the
system if you don't acknowledge SATA issues).

Most issues have been fixed or works for me.

Doug A.



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