Re: Lockups with Intel ICH5 SATA

Doug Ambrisko wrote:
> Tony Byrne writes:
> | In recent weeks my FreeBSD current box has been experiencing frequent
> | hard lockups.  Seldom a day goes by without the machine freezing
> | solid.  My hunch is that this is somehow related to the onboard Intel
> | ICH5 controller and SATA HD, because during reboot after a lockup,
> | the machine often complain of a DMA timeout that hangs the box
> | while reading from the SATA drive.
> 
> FYI, if the drive has a media error or does a spin down/spin up sequence
> things will hang since the ata driver currently doesn't deal with the
> SATA PHY registers.  After a while of ignoring various issues flagged
> in these bits your system will lock up solid on a inb/outb to the controller.
> 
> Doug A.

Can you explain this a bit more?  Is the driver ignoring the interrupt
and thus allowing an interrupt storm?  Or is it ACK'ing the interrupt,
but the ICH5 controller is expecting a certain further response that
it's not getting?  Or is it masking the interrupt entirely which in turn
exposes a flaw in the ICH5 hardware?

Scott