Promise SATA controllers & FreeBSD-7

[Scott Long]

David Taylor wrote:
> Well, its been almost 2 months since this was last mentioned (unless I
> missed something), and nothing appears to have moved since, well, the
> problem first appeared many months prior to that.
> 
> So as the branch for -7 is (hopefully) approaching, I thought I'd see if
> anyone had any news or ideas on this rather irritating problem.  Of course
> the main reason for my post is entirely selfish -- I'd like to experiment
> with ZFS, but system instability caused by even moderate disk usage is
> hardly conducive to worthwhile testing...
> 
> I, too, am seeing the now infamous:
> 
> adX: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=...
> 
> messages after simple commands like (cd /usr/ports; make search key=bonnie)
> 
> In my case, ad4 and ad6, connected to a Promise PDC20579 on-board SATA
> controller.

I'm working on this problem, but on generic ATA controllers, not on 
Promise in particular.  Not sure how different the Promise controllers 
are and whether what I fix will affect them.  I'll let you know when I
have something to test, though.

> 
> This system has been essentially entirely stable whilst running 6-STABLE
> for the past several years.
> 
> To me, this is a serious problem which will stop me from using FreeBSD-7.
> 
> If there is any way to help diagnose this problem, I'm willing to give
> what assistance I can, but I'm not too sure where to begin...
> 
> Alternatively, if anyone can recommend a cheap PCI SATA card which is
> known to work well with FreeBSD-7, I might just end up buying that...
> 

3ware, Areca, Highpoint, Adaptec.  All four companies are active in 
supporting FreeBSD.  There are good offerings from LSI as well if you're
willing to spend more money.

Scott