VT8237 serial-ATA support, Promise ATA stalls, GEOM noise

[Søren Schmidt]

Sean Hamilton wrote:
> "Søren Schmidt" <sos at DeepCore.dk> wrote:
> | These are not "hangs" these are "pauses" and happens because the
> | kernel thinks there are devices on these channels (are there ? no
> | dmesg provided) and waits for the 31secs the spec calls for. Now,
> | I have one of those exact Promise controllers and there it works
> | butifully, so your setup has to be special or wrong in some way
> | since you see the delays (again no dmesg or anything provided so
> | I cant tell)
> 
> There are no drives on the SATA interfaces, but there were at one point and
> I don't remember if it stalled or not. However I do remember them being very
> slow if I read them both in parallel (16 MB/sec each according to dd and
> systat) but very fast if I read only one (60 MB/sec) despite the system load
> being very low. In 5.1 I could only get 16 MB/sec even if I only read from a
> single drive. I can probably get my hands on more drives if this needs to be
> reproduced.

Hmm, those hangs are just time spent waiting for drives (that in this 
case are not there, but it can be difficult to tell).
I know that transferrates are OK on Promise controllers, fx I can dd 
 >50Mb/s off both my Seagates at the same time. However testing on the 
VIA SATA controller is limmited so far (as I dont have any here in the 
lab), but I havn't seen any such problems with it.

-- 
-Søren