Lockups with Intel ICH5 SATA

[Tony Byrne]

Hi,

In recent weeks my FreeBSD current box has been experiencing frequent
hard lockups.  Seldom a day goes by without the machine freezing
solid.  My hunch is that this is somehow related to the onboard Intel
ICH5 controller and SATA HD, because during reboot after a lockup,
the machine often complain of a DMA timeout that hangs the box
while reading from the SATA drive.

I have seen some FreeBSD-Current mails that mention issues
with with this controller and with SATA in general, so before I go
chasing other causes I was wondering if someone could tell me whether
there are open issues that could be the likely cause of these lockups.

I will say that the problem has only manifested itself in recent
weeks, around the time that I removed an old 30Gb PATA drive from the
box that I had been using for backup.  Unfortunately, that drive is no
longer available so I can't test whether it had a stabilizing
influence on the box.

Many thanks,

Regards,

Tony.

-- 
Tony Byrne