JMicron JMB363 PCIe controller doesn't work

[dieterbsd at engineer.com]

Wojciech Puchar writes:
> This crappy controllers have builtin bios that don't allow selecting 
AHCI mode.

The controller itself may be ok.  The BIOS is certainly crappy.

I have a couple of JMB363 PCIe x1 cards.  If I plug one into a certain
slot the machine hangs on boot (doesn't make it out of bios).  Avoiding 
that
slot, one card may or may not show up.  Ugly workaround: reboot over 
and over
until both show up.  Less painful workaround: I replaced one with a 
SiI3132 card.
The SiI3132 is not as fast as JMB363.

The remaining JMB363 card (Syba brand) does show up as AHCI and works 
with the
ahci(4) driver.  if the achi driver isn't loaded, then ata(4) driver 
also works,
but not as well, and certainly not as fast, as ahci.

I am told (thanks, Stephane) that some mainboards have an option in 
BIOS to
disable the BIOS on expansion cards.  My mainboard's crappy BIOS 
(Phoenix AwardBIOS)
does not offer this feature, perhaps yours does.

You might see if JMB has an alternative BIOS to flash.

> seems the problem is that FreeBSD can't by itself set SATA controller 
mode.
> i can't find such option.

Interesting.  I didn't know that the JMB363 had both AHCI and non-AHCI 
modes.
Or could it be an id issue?  If you do "pciconf -l" do you get 
0x2363197b for both
the onboard JMB363 and the expansion cards?