new server motherboard with SATA II

[Danny Carroll]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> This comes as no surprise, as there is no ICH10 knowledge in the PCI and
> ATA code at this time.  ICH10 is ***very*** new, as in probably within
> the past 6 weeks, no?
> 

Yes....   It's a new desktop machine that I am toying with before it 
needs to go to it's permanent owner.

> You're greatly confused with regards to what "amd64" means.  FreeBSD's
> 32-bit operating system is called i386.  FreeBSD's 64-bit operating
> system is called amd64.  It has absolutely **nothing** to do with
> processor types (AMD vs. Intel).

You can understand how that can happen I guess.  But thanks for setting 
me straight.

> FreeBSD's ability to boot off of FreeBSD-managed-RAID'd volumes is
> horrible.  Administrators have to go through a bunch of rigmarole to
> accomplish something that should be an absolute simplicity/necessity in
> this day and age.  This is one reason why I myself have considered using
> Intel MatrixRAID, because then that "layer" is generally transparent to
> FreeBSD.
> 
> In fact, ZFS on a root filesystem is still a "pain", yet Solaris has it
> down pat.

I had that whole hassle with either vinum or gmirror (can't remember 
which).  That's why this time I decided on a dedicated disk.  So long as 
I have a backup I don't care about a days downtime for the OS.


> There's a chance you'll see it on brand new SATA300 disks with all sorts
> of different SATA controller hardware (not limited to just one vendor),
> too.  The problem is somewhere within FreeBSD, and my Wiki page
> documents a workaround/patch that the FreeNAS guys came up with, which
> has sat ignored for over a year by the FreeBSD ATA maintainer.  Not a
> good sign.

Did it make it into 7-Current?

> Keep in mind that there have been some reports of ZFS on FreeBSD
> behaving incorrectly/oddly when a disk goes back, or a checksum error is
> found by ZFS.  The disk will resilver for no apparent reason.

Hmmmm....

> IRQ sharing is generally a "thing of the past", and interrupt conflicts
> are something from days prior to APICs being available on every
> motherboard under the sun.  Meaning: "swapping around" IRQs for onboard
> devices rarely does anything in this day and age.
> 
>> I'm thinking of getting a couple of Promise SATA-300 TX4 IO cards  
>> (non-raid).  Perhaps that will offload the CPU.
> 
> I don't see how that's going to help with heavy interrupt usage.  30%
> interrupt usage across 5 disks doesn't sound too odd, and going with a
> Promise controller that doesn't have its own dedicated driver (read: it
> will use ata(4)) won't address that.

30%....  Even at idle?   Granted it did not increase much with heavy IO 
but it surprised me a little that it's so high to start with.

So which controllers have their own driver/processors onboard that can 
eliminate the CPU hogging.

> You might be better off getting actual server hardware rather than
> "hacked up to be server" desktop hardware.  Consider Supermicro stuff.
> I can personally recommend their PDSMi+ motherboard, and many other
> FreeBSD users rely heavily on their hardware.

Well I still have the option to choose something so I'm open to all 
sorts of suggestions.   And actually that's kinda the point to me 
starting this post.  To find out what hardware does great IO with Sata.

I was also looking at TYAN gear.  I've used it in the past and been 
happy (but performance was never really an issue then).

Thanks so much for the tips so far.

-D