Raid controler IT 8212

[Dan Strick]

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 16:44:14 +0200, Andreas Antonovic wrote:
>>
> I have tried to install FreeBSD but the harddisk is not recognized
> because of my Raid controler ITE IT8212 ATA.
> Does anybody know where to get a FreeBSD device driver for this card ?
> I have looked up nearly all the web without sucess.
>>

I have one of these on my motherboard.  This device is essentially a
small processor that sits on the PCI bus as a device and has access to
a private ATA host adapter.  It can act on the PCI bus as a sort of
proxy for the ATA host adapter, but it doesn't do that very seamlessly.
I hacked it into the FreeBSD 4.10 ATA driver by defining its PCI vendor
and device IDs and got it to do non-DMA I/O with an ancient hard disk
that did not support DMA.  When I connected it to a modern CD drive
that did support DMA (no modern hard drive was available), it locked up.
There were other glitches.  I eventually gave up.

I exchanged some email with a Mark Lu at ITE who was working on a
FreeBSD driver that plugged into the SCSI CAM subsystem.  If you feel
ambitious, you might try to contact him at Mark.Lu at ite.com.tw.  He was
able to give me a technical document describing parts of the PCI
interface to the ITE 8212.  (Unfortunately it left far to much
undescribed.)

Dan Strick