sil3112a SATA Controller, current status

Hi,

I've been trying to install FreeBSD on my system that has an onboard
Silicon Image sil3112a SATA controller and a Western Digital Raptor
WD740 74GB HD, for a few months now, with no luck.

First I tried 5.2.1, which installs fine but starts to spew DMA
timeout messages when put under any kind of HD related stress and
eventually the system becomes totally unusable.

I tried a second time with 5.3-BETA7, the behaviour was exactly the same.

I was just browsing freebsd-current archives after a google.com search
and happened upon this e-mail:

<--quoted e-mail begin-->

To: current_at_freebsd.org
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 22:06:40 +0200 (CEST)


I have now found a way to reproduce the DMA problems some setups seems
to be having with the SiI3112A SATA chip.

Now, if I use real SATA drives, (and I mean real SATA drives, the
WD Raptor fx is not a real SATA device but just a PATA device
with a build in PATA->SATA converter chip) it works just fine
no matter what I try.

If however I use an older PATA drive and a certain PATA->SATA "dongle"
(in this case 1 out of 4 samples) I can reproduce the problem pretty
easily.

This suggests to me that we are looking at a timing problem of sorts
the question is where.

I'll work on the problem as time permits...

-Søren 

<--quoted e-mail end-->

I have to point out in the above e-mail that the problem is not just
confined to the 36GB Raptor, which might be a PATA drive with a Marvel
chip to make it work with SATA drives, but it also plagues *real*
native SATA drives as well, since the 74GB Western Digital Raptor I
have is a true SATA150 drive with TCQ.

Anyhow, I am wondering if this issue has been resolved yet or not,
either in FreeBSD-current or 5.3-RELEASE-px. I don't want to discard
my current OS to install FreeBSD only to find out that the problem is
still there. If  any sort of error logs or dmesg output is required by
a potential developer from this setup of mine, I'll go so far as to
resize my partition and install FreeBSD 5.3 and provide them, but the
reason why I'm hesitant in doing that is the fact that I run a
web-server on my computer that cannot stay down for long, as some
friends of mine depend on it.

Any feedback will be highly appreciated.

Thank You,
-Assad