Intel 865PERL SATA and FreeBSD 5.2.1

[tony lay]

No problems to report with my new board yet...but I'd like to discuss the 
best way to proceed here.

Before I go balls out on this I want to make sure I understand what I'm 
going to do a little better.  I have a new box that I put together with an 
Intel 865PERL motherboard.  One of the importiant features that I'd like to 
take advantage of is the SATA capabilaties.  I have two SATA drives on the 
way and I am planning on hooking them up and running a mirrored OS.

My data will be seperate, running off a promise controller card mirrored 
(UltraATA).

At this point I understand that SATA is young, but from what I've seen it's 
just now turning the corner, and I feel comfortable working it 
in...especially since this is a new box.  I understand that both the SATA 
and FreeBSD 5.2.1 aren't stable persay, but I would imagine that it would be 
stable enough to run php, a database, a webserver, samba and mail.  I won't 
be able to upgrade much once I release my box into production...so I need to 
have it a bit bleeding edge.  The old server here wasn't updated for 5 
years.  I plan on a little more due dillagence with this box...but I still 
need to start somewhere and I'd like to have ACL's for use with my domain 
and 4.9-STABLE doesn't have that support, nor is it backported that I know 
of.

Enough of an explination, here's my question:
In order to get SATA support I have to switch to Legacy Support in the BIOS.
Install FreeBSD 5.2.1  #OK
Rebuild my kernel with Jeff Garzik's libata driver  #UH HUH
Install Linux on an IDE drive with the new support  #Right?
Flip on SATA (Disable Legacy) in BIOS #Right?

Now as for mirroring...the perl865 lists the windows driver as Intel 82801ER 
ICH5-R or 82801EB ICH5

Go strong bad with my install

So besides the install order I'm a little sketchy on kernel building.  I 
guess this is a general cry for help.  I plan on reading up on my docs and 
doing this in the next week, but I figured that I would send this out so 
that maybe some more experienced folks could let me know the ins/outs and/or 
proceedures that they have used to do things like the kernel compile on 
freebsd and the integration of SATA.  Something tells me there may be a good 
better best way to do this.

Thanks for your replies in advance.

Regards,

-Tony

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