Problems with PCI SATA controller (bug in ATA driver? both ATAng and ATAmkIII)

[Alson van der Meulen]

(Please CC me in replies as I'm not a subscriber of this list)

Update: I tested with an i810-based mainboard (Celeron 1GHz, RTL8139
ethernet, Promise SATAII 150 TX4 controller, 3 SATA disks in RAID 5,
FreeBSD 6.0-RC1). It remained stable for two hours. I suspect this is
because it has far less bandwith (iostat showed only about 3MB/s to the
disks, as opposed to 12MB/s with the i915 mainboard). After I added a dd
if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=128k (this increased the bandwidth usage to the
disk to about 9MB/s according to iostat), it crashed in about 40
minutes. This suggests that it crashes because of the large amount of
I/O. However, it's only about 10MB/s per disk (for three disks), so it
doesn't seem to be that exotic to me.

Since this is a completely different mainboard, it seems clearly a
software issue to me. The built-in ICH6 controller works fine however,
so it may be PDC*0518/SII311* specific (which basically means any PCI
SATA controller available locally).

Alson