FreeBSD 8.0 and AHCI

[Graeme Dargie]

Hello All

I thought I would just give you an update and solution to a problem I
was having with the above.

Basically the machine would show no hard disks when AHCI driver was
loaded, with the following showing up at boot.

ahcich0: Poll timeout on slot 0

(aprobe0:ahcich0:0:0:0): SIGNATURE: 0000

ahcich1: Poll timeout on slot 0

(aprobe1:ahcich1:0:0:0): SIGNATURE: 0000

ahcich2: Poll timeout on slot 0

(aprobe2:ahcich2:0:0:0): SIGNATURE: 0000

ahcich3: Poll timeout on slot 0

(aprobe3:ahcich3:0:0:0): SIGNATURE: 0000

ahcich4: Poll timeout on slot 0

(aprobe4:ahcich4:0:0:0): SIGNATURE: 0000

ahcich5: Poll timeout on slot 0

(aprobe5:ahcich5:0:0:0): SIGNATURE: 0000

ahcich0: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich1: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich2: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich3: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich4: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich5: Timeout on slot 0

run_interrupt_driven_hooks: still waiting after 60 seconds for
xpt_config

ahcich0: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich1: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich2: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich3: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich4: Timeout on slot 0

ahcich5: Timeout on slot 0


Someone suggested that the drives were not in AHCI mode, I was 99% sure
that they were as it was the only way I could get all 6 sata ports
working, but until today I had not had a chance to confirm this. The
drives were already set to AHCI in the bios, and showed up in the AHCI
bios util and also at post.

I did some googling and it seems this is an issue with AMD SB700
chipsets as someone else had come across the same problem.

I gave a snapshot of 9.0 a shot just to see if the problem existed in
9.0 as well as 8.0, it does. Last resort was to do a BIOS update of the
mainboard, as it was on the original release F1 and F4 was available. On
reboot I noticed the AHCI bios revision had changed 00078 from 00070, I
still get a couple of timeout messages on boot, but the drives now
detect and work just fine.

Regards
Graeme