Am I using atacontrol attach properly? (sata hotplug issue).

[George Hartzell]

I have a Gigabyte GA-6KIEH-RH motherboard.  It has 5 SATA ports, 4
attached to a Sil 3114 controller and 1 attach to an ICH8m.  The
system is running -CURRENT from yesterday.

I have two disks attaching as ad4 and ad6 to ata2 and ata3 resp.

I can set ACHI mode for ICH8m in the BIOS.  When I do not enable it,
the 5th SATA conector shows up as slave on ata6.  When I do enable it
the 5th connector shows up as master on ata8.

If I boot without anything connected to the fifth port, then connect a
drive I thought that the following should work to get the drive
recognized:

  sudo atacontrol detach ata8
  sudo atacontrol attach ata8 

(or a similar dance with ata6 if AHCI isn't enabled).

When I set boot_verbose in loader.conf I see the following when I
attach (two separate attempts with different SATA drives):

ata8: AHCI reset...
ata8: SATA connect status=00000004
ata8: AHCI reset done: phy reset found no device
ata8: [MPSAFE]
ata8: [ITHREAD]
ata8: Identifying devices: 00000000
ata8: New devices: 00000000
ata8: AHCI reset...
ata8: SATA connect status=00000004
ata8: AHCI reset done: phy reset found no device
ata8: [MPSAFE]
ata8: [ITHREAD]
ata8: Identifying devices: 00000000
ata8: New devices: 00000000

If the drive's attached at boot time then it's recognized.

Am I doing something wrong, or is my hardware balky?

Thanks!

g.