SATA (Serial ATA) support in 2.4.x?

what's the status of SATA support in 2.4.x kernels?

it seems like the first kernel that supports SATA is 2.4.21-ac4. I
found few messages on lkml but not much more info about status of development.

I am specifically interested whether it should support disks above
137GB (as I have problems accessing anything above 137GB on 250GB SATA drive)

any info/answers/pointers to docs?

(I already posted a message here about 137GB & SATA but got no
answers so I am trying somewhat different question)

TIA

erik

It should.

I will be testing this when I return from OLS, next week.

Jeff

any news?

I have found that /var/log/kern.log has following messages (when
trying to access blocks above 137GB, using e.g. badblocks):

Jul 29 00:41:02 jojda kernel: Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Jul 29 00:41:02 jojda kernel: SCSI device sda: 490234752 512-byte hdwr sectors (251000 MB)
Jul 29 00:41:03 jojda kernel:  sda: sda1
Jul 29 00:47:41 jojda kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 268435456
Jul 29 00:47:41 jojda kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 268435456
Jul 29 00:47:41 jojda kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 268435472
Jul 29 00:47:41 jojda kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 268435456
Jul 29 00:47:41 jojda kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 268435456
Jul 29 00:47:41 jojda kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 268435464
Jul 29 00:47:41 jojda last message repeated 3 times

I have found where these are coming from (drivers/scsi/scsi_lib.c)
but it's in fairly generic error routine that is called from number of places so it doesn't explain anything to me... (I'll take a look at it again but considering that I have almost zero experience with kernel programming it probably will not be very useful)

this is using linux-2.4.21-ac4 kernel (scsi sata, as above messages show)

erik

just in case anybody's searching the archives:

I got the following advice from Jeff Garzik and it worked (didn't do
much testing yet, but at least the whole disk is usable):

2.4.21-ac4 (vanilla plus ac4 patches)

create another vanilla tree with libata5 patches, then copy the
following files to ac4 tree: drivers/scsi/{ata_piix,libata}.c and include/linux/ata.h

build with scsi ata support (make sure you have bios set so that sata
drives are seen as sata drives, not legacy ide drives, I only got machines lockups in legacy mode). The disks should be visible as scis disk (/dev/sd[a-z]).

libata5 patch:

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/patchkits/2.4/2.4.21-libata5.patch.bz2

erik