sata pci cards in ultra 60 or blade 1000 (Update)

Sat Sep 5 22:50:51 UTC 2009

Hi all,
I have upgraded the Os version on the blade 1000 to FreeBSD 8.0-BETA2.

I am at a cross-road.  I have Two sata controllers that are almost working.

I just recently acquired a SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA 
Controller.  This controller had the same behaviour as the Sil 3512 as 
explained in the attached email below from Jul 22, on ___FreeBSD 7.2___ Stable. 
Since the upgrade to 8.0-BETA2, I actually get the SuperMicro to see the 
attached Hitachi Disk Drive.  The problem is that it doesn't complete the 
booting!  It hangs just after printing the details to the SCSI boot/root disk, 
see SNIPPET.

BOOT-SNIPPET (truncated):
-------------
gem0: <Sun ERI 10/100 Ethernet> mem 0x100000-0x11ffff at device 5.1 on pci0
miibus0: <MII bus> on gem0
ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus0
ukphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
gem0: 2kB RX FIFO, 2kB TX FIFO
gem0: Ethernet address: 00:03:ba:02:b3:db
gem0: [ITHREAD]
pci0: <serial bus, FireWire> at device 5.2 (no driver attached)
pci0: <serial bus, USB> at device 5.3 (no driver attached)
sym0: <875> port 0x300-0x3ff mem 0x124000-0x1240ff,0x126000-0x126fff at device 
6.0 on pci0
sym0: No NVRAM, ID 7, Fast-20, SE, parity checking
sym0: [ITHREAD]
sym1: <875> port 0x400-0x4ff mem 0x128000-0x1280ff,0x12a000-0x12afff at device 
6.1 on pci0
sym1: No NVRAM, ID 7, Fast-20, SE, parity checking
sym1: [ITHREAD]
pcib1: <Sun Host-PCI bridge> mem 
0x40004600000-0x40004617fff,0x40004410000-0x4000441004f,0x7ffec000000
pcib1: Schizo, version 4, IGN 0x8, bus A, 66MHz
Timecounter "pcib1" frequency 150000000 Hz quality 100
pcib1: DVMA map: 0xc0000000 to 0xffffffff
pcib1: [FILTER]
pci1: <OFW PCI bus> on pcib1
pci1: <mass storage, SCSI> at device 4.0 (no driver attached)
atapci0: <Marvell 88SX6081 SATA300 controller> port 0x400-0x4ff mem 
0x200000-0x2fffff,0x400000-0x7fff1
atapci0: [ITHREAD]
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci0
ata2: [ITHREAD]
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci0
ata3: [ITHREAD]
ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci0
ata4: [ITHREAD]
ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci0
ata5: [ITHREAD]
ata6: <ATA channel 4> on atapci0
ata6: [ITHREAD]
ata7: <ATA channel 5> on atapci0
ata7: [ITHREAD]
ata8: <ATA channel 6> on atapci0
ata8: [ITHREAD]
ata9: <ATA channel 7> on atapci0
ata9: [ITHREAD]
nexus0: <upa> mem 
0x40004480000-0x4000448001f,0x40004706000-0x4000470600f,0x40004708000-0x4000470800f)
schppm0: <Schizo power management> mem 0x40004410050-0x40004410057 on nexus0
nexus0: <syscons> type unknown (no driver attached)
Timecounter "tick" frequency 750000000 Hz quality 1000
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
ipfw2 initialized, divert enabled, nat loadable, rule-based forwarding enabled, 
default to deny, loggd
ad0: 953869MB <Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 ST6OA31B> at ata7-master SATA300
da0 at sym1 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <FUJITSU MAS3367NP 5B08> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 16, 16bit)
da0: Command Queueing enabled
da0: 34732MB (71132959 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 4427C)

-------------------------
END-SNIPPET.

Note that ad0, the Hitachi sata disk was never seen in FreeBSD 7.2 stable. Now 
it is.  But, we don't go past that last line above in the snippet during boot. 
A normal boot, without the Hitachi disk should show these additional lines, 
denoted by +++:

da0 at sym1 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <FUJITSU MAS3367NP 5B08> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 16, 16bit)
da0: Command Queueing enabled
da0: 34732MB (71132959 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 4427C)
+++GEOM: da0: adding VTOC8 information.
+++Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/da0a
+++No suitable dump device was found.
+++Entropy harvesting: interrupts ethernet point_to_point kickstart.
+++/dev/da0a: FILE SYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS
+++/dev/da0a: clean, 8098831 free (4663 frags, 1011771 blocks, 0.1% 
fragmentation)
+++/dev/da0d: FILE SYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS
+++/dev/da0d: clean, 7243043 free (3547 frags, 904937 blocks, 0.0% 
fragmentation)
+++gem0: link state changed to UP
+++Starting Network: lo0 gem0.
+++add net default: gateway 192.168.x.x
+++Flushed all rules.
+++
+++..................

So, can any body help get this to boot to normal os, and then maybe with 
addition tweaks, I can the whole thing working.

The other part of the cross-roads is the Sil 3512 development since my last 
email from Jul 22, but I would rather concentrate on the SuperMicro controller: 
But, if any body is curious, I now have the Sil 3512 show disks, and I can put 
partitions on the disk, and mount it.  It seems if I put light activity on the 
disk, It works for a while; light activity being moving files (tar or cp) to 
the disk on the Sil 3512 at a rate slower than 5 or 6 MB/s.  If that rate 
increases to past 6 or 7 MB/s, then I get a hard lock.  The ata driver detaches 
the disk on the Sil 3512, and the only way to regain control is to do a hard 
reset/reboot.

Any way, if any body has clues and suggestions on how I should proceed, I would 
be quite listening.

Thanks,

robert

> On Wed, 22 Jul 2009, R J wrote:

> Hi all,
> I have both an ultra 60 and a Sun blade 1000.  I have freebsd 7.2 running on 
> both seemingly without issue, outside of sata pci.
> 
> I have had a promise SATA300 TX4, 66MHZ (4 port version) in the ultra 60 and 
> rebuild the kernel to contain the ata driver.  When the system boots, it sees 
> the card just fine, but it doesn't see any drives attached to it. I had two 
> disks attached (one 40gig fujitsu, and one is a 1TB hitachi), but none of 
> them were seen.  I tried powering the drives with a different power supply, 
> but they would not be seen by the promise controller.  The drives work fine 
> in a pc with linux.
> 
> I switched out the promise card, and put a silicon image Sil 3512 in the 
> ultra 60, and the two drives were seen.  I was able to lay ufs file system on 
> them, and even copied files around, but the system was not stable. I.e, I 
> would copy files to the sata hard drives for a few minutes before it would 
> hang and remain that way till I did a hard reset.
> 
> I then took the Sil 3512 out of the ultra60 and put it in the Sun blade 1000, 
> and attached the drives, and, just like the promise card, the sil card is 
> seen by freebsd, but the drives are not.  Remember, the drives are seen with 
> the same card in the ultra60.  I currently don't have the promise card with 
> me to test with the blade, but I would imagine the same thing will happen.
> 
> Has any body had success with sata pci cards in any of the ultrasparc pci 
> systems?  If so, what cards/chipsets/workarounds?
> 
> Other than the 66mhz v 33mhz(with respective 3.3/5 volt) and 32 v 64 bit, is 
> there any other thing quirky about the sparc pci busses that would cause this 
> sort of behaviour?
> 
> Any help appreciated.
> 
> Robert
>