Siis(4) does not play well with others! :-(

Dieter BSD dieterbsd at engineer.com
Sun May 15 16:22:32 UTC 2011


> For now, I can only say that you are still running not the latest driver
> version. Latest have some delays reduced and report connect time in
> "us". May be some more of remaining could be replaced with interrupts
> (specifically on siis hardware), but I need to think and experiment more
> with it.

I was able to swap cables and put that disk on the JMB363 controller.
(directly, no port multiplier) I now just get read errors from the disk
and a "error = 5" message from g_vfs_done(), but no messages from ahci(4)
at all, and no other problems.

So much for testing the disk before putting it into service.  I read the
entire disk, then wrote the entire disk with 0x00, 0xff, 0x55 and 0xaa,
reading it back each time into hexdump -C.  Put it into service, and
after 82 GB of real data (on a 2 TB drive) it fails.  grumble

My todo list:

1) Build new kernel with the latest siis(4) and achi(4) bits.

2) Test if a read error causes achi(4) to lock out Ethernet for too long.

3) Test with achi(4) with and without a port multiplier.

3) Test with siis(4) with and without a port multiplier.

> Generally, the situation when the system doesn't reboot with the reset
> button doesn't smell good to me.

FreeBSD does something that disables the soft power switch.  I don't
recall if I've had problems with reset before.  Stopping the PM LEDS
blinking but not doing a full reset seems pretty odd.  Something
important must not be getting reset.  I thought Tyan's mainboards were
supposed to be "tier 1".  :-(

I'm still puzzled that one Ethernet responded to ping but another did not.


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