Lockups with Intel ICH5 SATA

[Doug Ambrisko]

Tony Byrne writes:
| 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.

FYI, if the drive has a media error or does a spin down/spin up sequence
things will hang since the ata driver currently doesn't deal with the
SATA PHY registers.  After a while of ignoring various issues flagged
in these bits your system will lock up solid on a inb/outb to the controller.

Doug A.