make -j as a stress test (was: Re: Quality of FreeBSD) [WARNING - 6.0-BETA1 still hosed!]

[Erik Trulsson]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 09:01:36PM -0500, Karl Denninger wrote:
> Done.
> 
> Note that the Bustek and Adaptec cards which exhibit the problem BOTH 
> identify the same (on two different machines) as SII 3112 boards, and
> BOTH fail.
> 
> There are minor differences in the interrupts and memory mapping used
> (which is to be expected, as there are peripherals in the production
> machines that are NOT in the sandbox, specifically, an additional dual-port
> 100TX network card and a SCSI host adapter for the DLT backup device) so
> the PCI mapping would be expected to be slightly different.
> 
> This pretty clearly looks like some kind of software problem with the SII
> 3112 support.... which just happens to be the chipset that is on basically
> ALL the "plain-jane" PCI SATA cards out there, no matter who makes them.


Quoting from the commitlogs for sys/dev/ata/ata-chipset.c:

  ----------------------------
  revision 1.50
  date: 2003/12/08 09:22:20;  author: sos;  state: Exp;  lines: +3 -1
  More errata fixing for the SiI3112A disaster chip:

  Serialize access to the SATA channels, the chip messes up if
  both channels are used at the same time.

  The SiI3112 hereby takes the price as the most crappy SATA chip in
  existance by a significant amount.

  My advise to our userbase is to avoid this chip like the plague...
  ----------------------------


There are plenty of SATA-controllers that do not use this chip - all the
Promise controllers for example - some of which are reasonably cheap.


The only cards that seem to use the SiI 3112 are the very cheapest cards -
and it is generally a good idea to avoid the really low-end stuff, since it
is usually substandard and not worth its price.

I will also note that though the SiI 3112 seemed quite common on early
AMD64-motherboards, it is almost unknown on later motherboards which seem
to often use the SiI 3114 instead - I assume there was a good reason for
this switch. 



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se