VT8237 serial-ATA support, Promise ATA stalls, GEOM noise

[Sean Hamilton]

  I'm looking to replace an aging fileserver with an Asus A7V600 board.
Presently it appears FreeBSD does not support the serial ATA interface on
the south bridge. As this appears to be the first Via serial ATA controller,
am I safe in assuming this will not be supported for some time?

  I have two Asus boards (A7V8X and A7V) which have in common a Promise ATA
controller. Both of these boards hang up for about a minute during the boot
of 5.1-RELEASE, and emit messages about ad* devices being reset -- I cannot
paste them verbatim as they seem to have been omitted from my dmesg. In the
case of the A7V8X, the controller is unused and disabled in the BIOS. Has
this been rectified for 5.2?

  When using atacontrol's software RAID functionality, GEOM laments "Opened
disk ad6 -> 1" at boot. This seems like benign noise, perhaps it should be
removed -- it appears to be a forgotten debug message, /sys/geom/geom_disk.c
1.72, line 115.