Re: Got rid of my SiI3112A

On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 10:39:46AM -0500, Michael W. Lucas wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 10:40:41PM +0100, Daniel Eriksson wrote:
> > Frode Nordahl wrote:
> > 
> > > But as things are today, I think it would be best to remove 
> > > support for 
> > > SiI3112A. Especially since the general attitude towards it is 
> > > "it's too 
> > > broke, we don't want to waste any more time on it".
> > > 
> > > Attempting to use it in a 5.3-RELEASE or 6-CURRENT system will most 
> > > likelly make your system crash and burn, and make your data 
> > > unrecoverable beyond repair.
> > 
> > I will have to agree with Frode on this one. I recently put -CURRENT on a
> > machine with an ASUS mobo that had a SiL 3112 controller. Hooking up two
> > 250GB WD discs to it quickly resulted in timeouts, followed by some strange
> > messages from geom_stripe (used it to stripe the two discs), followed by
> > filesystem corruption and panics.
> 
> Does anyone know if Soren has one of these controllers?
> 
> Getting him a poorly-supported controller is the first step towards
> getting it fixed.

He probably has one.  Otherwise I don't think he would write
commit-messages like this one 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...
----


I take it that it is not so much a matter of this controller being
poorly supported, as of this being a poor controller.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013_at_student.uu.se