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Re: major problems with ataraid(4) on an Asus PSCH-SR/SATA motherboard with Intel 6300ESB



On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 12:20:50PM -0500, Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc. wrote:
> I recently acquired a little system with an Asus PSCH-SR/SATA motherboard 
> in it for the primary purpose of building a backup server (and possibly 
> also extend it eventually to use as a PVR of some sort).  However I'm not 
> having very much luck accessing the SATA/RAID drives installed in it.
>
> I'm running a NetBSD-4.0_STABLE GENERIC.MP kernel on it built from fresh 
> sources a couple of days ago.
>
> The following hardware relevant to this problem shows up in dmesg output:
>
~~~~
>
> However whenever I try to write any significant amount of data to the ld0 
> device, eg. in order to newfs a filesystem on it, the process doing the 
> writing eventually just hangs in "physio2".  Here's a newfs process that I 
> started last night and which is still hung in exactly the same spot as it 
> did a few moments after doing some initial I/O activity:
>
~~~~
>
> Note that processes hung in physio2 are not interruptible and so if this 
> were a newfs during an install attempt then the only recourse is to hit the 
> reset or power switches -- very annoying.  Note the implication here too 
> that a uniprocessor INSTALL kernel suffers the same problem.
>
> Has anyone else had any success using ataraid(4) on an Intel 6300ESB based 
> implementation with NetBSD-4.0_STABLE?

I've got one, maybe it has a HostRAID BIOS and I could check, but I don't
really have two spare SATA drives ATM.

>
> Should I turn this info into a PR?
>
> Is there any further debugging I could try?  Would a crash dump be helpful 
> to anyone who might be able to fix this problem?
>
> Note that when wd1 and wd2 are configured as JBOD (instead of the desired 
> RAID-1 array) then they are fully usable by NetBSD -- I can install a fully 
> functional system without any problem.  I could then use RAIDframe to 
> achieve the mirroring I desire, but I think I would prefer to use the 
> native RAID-1 support in order to simplify installation and maintenance, at 
> least until sysinst(8) can directly support RAIDframe configuration and 
> installation.

Well, the INSTALL ramdisk does, but you must do it manually.  I played
with ataraid(4) once, after looking at it, raidframe felt more
secure. (I.E. The missing rebuild functionality in ataraid(4).)

>
> As an aside:  note this motherboard also includes a Marvell 88SX5041 SATA 
> controller that also implements the Adaptec HostRAID functionality.  It 
> shows up as:
>
> Marvell 88SX5041 SATA (SCSI mass storage, revision 0x03) at pci2 dev 8 
> function 0 not configured
>
> Does anyone have any clues on how hard it would be to add ataraid(4) 
> support for this chip too?

Uh, i think you mean ata(4) support. :)

>
> Can I at least directly access any drives attached to the 88SX5041 as JBOD 
> devices with some driver that could be cobbled into NetBSD 4.0_STABLE?  It 
> would be nice to be able to use all of the integrated SATA hardware to 
> support additional drives rather than also having to add another SATA 
> controller to this machine, especially since it's in a relatively 
> space-restricted 2U chassis.

The FreeBSD pciide(4) marvell_edma support hasn't been ported
into a NetBSD driver.  I'd be interested in porting it, but I
don't have hardware.  Also, I don't think it's a publicly
documented chip.

        Jonathan Kollasch

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