sil3112a SATA Controller, current status

[Chris Smith]

Hi,

> I've been trying to install FreeBSD on my system that has an onboard
> Silicon Image sil3112a SATA controller and a Western Digital Raptor
> WD740 74GB HD, for a few months now, with no luck.

Pain.

> First I tried 5.2.1, which installs fine but starts to spew DMA
> timeout messages when put under any kind of HD related stress and
> eventually the system becomes totally unusable.

> I tried a second time with 5.3-BETA7, the behaviour was exactly the same.

Just to help things along, I have a SIL3112 controller on my workstation
(Asus A7n8x-e platform).. relevant bits

dmesg:-

atapci0: <SiI 3112 SATA150 controller> port
0xa400-0xa40f,0xa000-0xa003,0x9c00-0x9c07,0x9800-0x9803,0x9400-0x9407
mem 0xe8004000-0xe80041ff irq 18 at device 11.0 on pci1
ad4: 76319MB <ST380013AS/3.18> [155061/16/63] at ata2-master SATA150
ad6: 76319MB <ST380013AS/3.05> [155061/16/63] at ata3-master SATA150

uname:-

FreeBSD shodan.ninjalabs.co.uk 5.3-STABLE FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE #0: Sun Nov
14 08:29:40 GMT 2004
chris at shodan.ninjalabs.co.uk:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SHODAN  i386

Works fine here.  Could this be a DMA / IRQ conflict on your particular
configuration?

I have had problems with Raptor disks on a supermicro platform (ICH5
controller) under Windows.  Could it be the disks?

Cheers,

Chris Smith
http://www.ninjalabs.co.uk/