Lockups with Intel ICH5 SATA

David Schultz das at FreeBSD.ORG
Thu May 20 21:12:39 PDT 2004


On Thu, May 20, 2004, Tony Byrne wrote:
> 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 see this as well with two identical SATA drives on an Intel
875PBZ motherboard.  The drives last worked reliably with sources
just prior to 5.2-RELEASE, and prior to that, just shortly before
5.0-RELEASE.  (Notice a pattern? ;) )  You may want to try older
sources.  Also, I have had good luck with Doug Ambrisko's ATA
patches, although I haven't tried to investigate which part of the
patch fixes the problem.

If I have some time this summer, I'll try to deconstruct one of
Soeren's mega-commits to figure out exactly what change broke the
ATA driver for my hardware.  Unfortunately, I usually get disk
corruption when the machine locks up, so the problem is painful to
reproduce.


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