Backport of ServerWorks ATA to 4-Stable?

John Wilson jmw_ymail at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 30 12:11:45 PST 2003


Hi, Kevin.

I, too, have the Dell PowerEdge 600SC.  Here is my IDE
configuration:

- 120GB Western Digital on primary master.
- Plextor CD-RW on secondary master.
- Lite-On DVD-Rom on secondary slave.

I've been running the 4-Stable series of FBSD for
quite some time now and just relegated the lack of
support of the ServerWorks Southbridge to "should be
here soon."  Just for grins, I installed 5.0 and
cvsup'd -Current.

While running 5.0, I was able to throw the primary HD
into UDMA100 and noticed a fair amount of increased
"visual" performance.  The same went for the CD-RW and
DVD-Rom, under UDMA33.  I burned a number of full CD's
and made a number of full dumps of various DVD's to
the HD without issue.

Also, with the CD-RW and DVD-Rom, while running under
4.x, there is quite a hit on the interrupt activity as
reported by `top` while copying large amounts of data.
 On 5.0-Current, there was virtually none.   This is
about as scientific I've gotten with this thus far. :p

In regard to your machine not being able to recognize
slave devices, I don't really know.  I've both the
CD-RW and DVD-Rom on the secondary controller without
a hitch, and one HD on the primary master.

> What were your atacontrol settings, and how did you
> differentiate the 
> results (dmesg, sysctl)?

If I remember correctly, I used the following under
5.0:

atacontrol mode 0 UDMA100 UDMA100
atacontrol mode 1 UDMA33 UDMA33

Attempting to place the secondary controller into DMA
mode under 4.x, the machine would lock up shortly
after.

One other thing, the dmesg for 4.x states the
following:
pcib0: <ServerWorks host to PCI bridge(unknown
chipset)> on motherboard

Where as under 5.0, the dmesg correctly picked up and
displayed actual support for the CSB6 Southbridge.   I
don't have a dmesg handy for this.

- John

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