em(4) interface hangs under 8.0-RELEASE

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 01:28:13AM +0000, Thomas Hurst wrote:
> * Steven Hartland (killing at multiplay.co.uk) wrote:
> 
> > If that's a supermicro then em3 is usually the IPMI shared card so perhaps
> > that's the cause?
> 
> No, it's a Tyan K8WE:
> 
>  http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/thunderk8we.html
> 
> With a quad port Intel NIC in one of the 133MHz PCI-X slots.  There's a
> Supermicro Marvell 8x SATA card in another slot that's been experiencing
> ZFS CKSUM errors since updating to 8 too, which is slightly suspicious.
> 
> Would like to replace the SATA card with a nice simple AHCI board.
> Sadly nobody seems to make them.

It's been mentioned in the past that for "simple" SATA expansion cards,
a good/affordable choice at this point are cards using the Silicon Image
3124/3132/3531 chips (driven by the siis(4) driver).  Avoid the 3112.

The reason I say that (despite not having any experience with them) is
there's active development on that driver by mav@, and SI is apparently
fairly forthcoming with docs/quirks.

Otherwise Areca cards are a good choice, but are $$$.

I personally stick solely to on-board SATA driven by Intel controllers
(ICH7/9/10 or ESB), but if I had to get an expansion card, at this point
I'd probably go the SI 3124 route.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |