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

[Alexander Motin]

Hi.

George Hartzell wrote:
> 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).

It is ICH8M port, right?

> 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

There is very little part of AHCI driver takes part on this stage. 
Mostly it is done by common ata_sata_phy_reset() routine. Try to comment
	if ((ATA_IDX_INL(ch, ATA_SCONTROL) & ATA_SC_DET_MASK) == 
ATA_SC_DET_IDLE)
		return ata_sata_connect(ch);
lines in there. It will force full hardware reset to the drive.

> If the drive's attached at boot time then it's recognized.
> 
> Am I doing something wrong, or is my hardware balky?

Every hardware has some specifics. I have successfully tested hot-plug 
working with AHCI on ICH8, ICH8M and JMB363.

-- 
Alexander Motin