FreeBSD 5.3 freezes under heavy hdd load

[James Seward]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:04:50 -0800, Doug Hardie <bc979 at lafn.org> wrote:
> You might want to install the smartmontools port and use it to access
> the disk performance data.  That should give you good information on
> the status of the drives and any problems they have encountered.
> 
Smartmontools reports no problems with the drives; the system doesn't
appear to be over heating at all.

A bit more investigation shows it's panic'ing with "privileged
instruction in non-priviliged mode" in what appears to be lseek().
This may or may not be related to the DMA TIMEOUT problem as I didn't
see any timeouts before any of the panics I've witnessed.

A bit more reading around suggests that the timeout issue is strongly
related to my SI3112 SATA controller so I'm thinking of changing it;
can anyone please recommend an SATA controller they're using which
hasn't given them any problems? (Even better if they have Maxtor
drives hanging off it!)

I am also attempting to upgrade my system to a newer cvs but
unfortunately I can't buildkernel on it - it'll either panic or
generate enough timeouts to make "make" fail. If anyone could point me
at a HOWTO or similar on cross-compiling then I'll compile it on my
other machine instead (2xP3-1Ghz vs my desktop being an Athlon XP
1700+).

All help appreciated as currently my desktop is becoming unusable and
I fear for the safety of my data with the sheer number of panics being
generated by disk use :)