FreeBSD and SATA Port Multipliers

[Alexander Motin]

Steve Polyack wrote:
> I have a system running FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 that contains 3x Sil3124 PCI-E
> SATA controller cards.  Each card has 3x Sil3726 Port Multipliers
> attached (5 slots per SATA PM).  The problem is that the disks are often
> not all detected by FreeBSD, even though the controller Option ROMs list
> all of the installed physical disks.  Which drive(s) are not detected
> seems to vary with each boot.  All of the port multipliers are detected
> every boot, it's just the drives which aren't getting probed.
> 
> I've tried the following patch,
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/129784 , which may have
> helped - it picks up 6-8 out of 9 disks, but obviously that's not
> ideal.  The motherboard BIOS version is current, as is the firmware for
> the SATA controllers.
> 
> Does anyone have any ideas or other patches that I may try?

Have you tried new CAM-based ATA subsystem present in 8.x by siis(4)
driver? Work is still in progress there, but it should work with port
multipliers much better then previous implementation.

-- 
Alexander Motin