FreeBSD Doesn't "See" Crucial C300 SSD on Marvell Controller

[Jud]

The old desktop gave up the ghost after many years of use (memory
problems plus a hard drive with an increasing number of bad sectors),
and I've just finished putting together a new one.  Win7 x64 and Ubuntu
amd64 are running on it, and I would dearly love to install FreeBSD.

Hardware is an ASUS Rampage III Formula motherboard with a Crucial C300
256GB SATA 6GB/s-capable SSD connected to one of the motherboard's two
internal SATA 6GB/s ports.  These two ports use a Marvell 88SE9128
onboard chip as the controller.  The controller is supposed to support
(hardware) RAID, but of course with one drive I am using it in "normal"
non-RAID mode.  (To say this particular controller chip has a
problematic reputation at the moment is a bit of an understatement. 
I've personally seen some weirdness, including the Crucial drive not
showing up in the BIOS boot priority menu a time or two.  Nevertheless,
as I said Winders and Ubuntu are running and I'm really looking forward
to having my favorite OS on my new box.)  I also have two Hitachi
Deskstar drives and a USB stick.

I tried the October amd64 DVD snapshot of -CURRENT from the snapshots
page, guessing it would have the latest hardware support.  The DVD boots
into the installer, but sysinstall only shows me the Deskstars and the
USB stick as options to install to.

Puttering around the lists trying to find something that has any chance
of being relevant, I ran across this excerpt from a post to the
freebsd-current list in October:

****************************************************************************
>> In an attempt to get more information about this issue, I'd like to ask
>> people on freebsd-current if they're using any Sandforce-based SSDs with
>> FreeBSD. So far, it appears not a lot of people do, making it hard to
>> debug this issue (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=151608).
> 
> MCP5x SATA are not the best controllers for compatibility testing. They
> have enough problems on their own, even without Sandforce.
> 
> When you tested Marvell, have you tried to use mvs(4) driver?

No, I only tried to use ata(4). I tried using mvs(4) now, and that
works!

mvs0: <Marvell 88SX6081 SATA controller> port 0x4000-0x40ff mem
0xb0100000-0xb01fffff irq 11 at device 2.0 on pci1
mvs0: Gen-II, 8 3Gbps ports, Port Multiplier supported
mvsch0: <Marvell SATA channel> at channel 0 on mvs0
mvsch1: <Marvell SATA channel> at channel 1 on mvs0
mvsch2: <Marvell SATA channel> at channel 2 on mvs0
mvsch3: <Marvell SATA channel> at channel 3 on mvs0
mvsch4: <Marvell SATA channel> at channel 4 on mvs0
mvsch5: <Marvell SATA channel> at channel 5 on mvs0
mvsch6: <Marvell SATA channel> at channel 6 on mvs0
mvsch7: <Marvell SATA channel> at channel 7 on mvs0

ada0 at mvsch0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <OCZ-AGILITY2 3.5 1.11> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 2048bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 85857MB (175836528 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)

****************************************************************************

I don't know enough to understand whether "using mvs" has a chance of
working for me.  If it might, how do I "use mvs" when attempting to
install?  (The DVD does have the fixit environment available.)

Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions,

Jud
-- 
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