5.3-RELEASE: WARNING - WRITE_DMA interrupt timout

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 7:33 PM -0800 11/18/04, Zoltan Frombach wrote:
>For your information, I applied this patch just now to my kernel.
>Sorry about the delay! I will send an update in a few days once I
>see if those DMA_WRITE warnings are still happening or not.

For those who may have missed my other message, it looks like all
of my problems were related to a PCI-based SATA controller which
was added by the store that built my machine.  This card was added
even though I had selected a motherboard with on-board SATA.

The problem controller was a:   <SiI 3112 SATA150 controller>
and it has been causing me enough problems that I couldn't get
through a buildworld to even try the suggested patch.

I have now switched to the on-board: <VIA 6420 SATA150 controller>
and so far I have not seen any more of these WRITE_DMA messages.
None.  And I have been pounding the disk pretty hard with a
variety of work for a few hours now.  So, now there is no point
in me adding the patch, because I no longer see the message!

It would still be nice if FreeBSD would react better to whatever
problems this card causes.  I still have this stupid card, and I
would be happy to mail it off to anyone who might want to debug the
problems with it.  And if we *can't* fix it, then maybe we should
just remove support for it.  I have had to rebuild my freebsd
partitions several times now due to these problems, and certainly
that wasn't much fun.  Although I guess my problems might also be
partially due to the Western Digital drive I was using, when it is
used in combination with this card.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu