Serial ATA (sii3512a) support

Hello everyone. I'm just wondering what the status is for the Silicon Image 3512a serial ata support is.

I was using gentoo-sources 2.6.12 my Seagate drives worked fine. I'm now running a gentoo-sources 2.6.15-r1 and support has broken. The same thing with gentoo-sources 2.6.17-r8. I've added my drives to the sata_sil.c black list (one of them was missing) but I still get "Abnormal status 0x58 on port ..." errors. Which essentially crashes my machine.

Unfortunately I don't have the 2.6.12 kernel from Gentoo any more as I did a emerge --sync and it got rid of it. Also some of the other drivers I'm using need more recent kernel versions.

Just some notes on my MB/chipsets. I've got a Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2 with an nForce2 chipset. It has a on board SATA which the manual says is a Sil3112 but the bios reports it as a Sil3512a. I've got a single 6 gig IDE as my boot device and root dir. There are also two SATA drives both are Seagates. One is a ST3250823AS (250 gigs) and a ST3120026AS (120 gigs). I know the Seagate drives have some issues and hence the black list.

Just wondering if there is anything I can do to make these things work in some of the latest kernels. Thanks for you help.

Stephen Atkins

[cc'ing linux-ide]

Pretty good actually.

That looks like transmission failure and to me it doesn't seem to be a driver problem and please don't add your drive to sata_sil blacklist. The blacklist is for very specific cases and won't fix your problem other than sometimes hiding the real problem by slowing things down a lot.

When does such error occur? Is it reproducible? How often does it occur?

Can you give a shot at 2.6.18? It contains improved EH which should be able to recover from the condition you described.

tejun