unable to use gmirror on supermicro 5015b-mt

[Steve Bertrand]

Clifton Royston wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 09:23:52PM +0100, ian j hart wrote:
> ...
>> As I suspected, no takers :)
>>
>> "Fix".
>>
>> In /boot/loader.conf
>>
>> hw.ata.atapi_dma="0"
>>
>> This allows kldload without hang. I'm sure that this fix will allow me to 
>> configure a mirror. I'll post back if I'm wrong.
> 
>   OK, but *probably* this is an indicator that you need to either
> replace the cable (think you said you've tried that) or replace the
> motherboard.  If the cable is known-good and the other components are
> known-good, and it won't run with DMA on supported hardware, something
> is seriously wrong with this particular board and odds are too high
> that it will die horribly later.  (Not to mention that you'll be
> hammering your CPU just to get lousy throughput out of it.)

This was the same issue I experienced with the NVidia board that I 
mentioned in the 'taskqueue timeout' thread last week.

As I mentioned thereafter, I used my workstation board (Intel), and 
everything worked fine (ZFS).

I tried then to set up my Windows workstation on the NVidia board, and 
thereafter found out that it would ONLY operate in PIO(4), no matter 
what I did.

Needless to say, the board was RMA'd, and I have a new Intel board on 
its way to handle the ZFS file system.

>   As you said in the other post, you've already spent hours of your
> life you won't get back - do you want to sign up for some more hours
> further down the road?

IMHO, just replace the board. If you are not able to acquire DMA on the 
disk subsystem, you've lost already.

>   -- Clifton (suddenly questioning why I'm spending hours on mailing lists today)

...because your systems are running so smoothly, you have to be typing 
something to justify your office space? ;)

Steve