31244 & sata_vsc.c & Dell Powervault

Hi,

YES!! You must build a kernel with (at least) the following options:

Processor type and features -> Local APIC support on uniprocessors Processor type and features -> IO-APIC support on uniprocessors General setup -> Power Management support -> ACPI Support

and I have successfully built and run a monolithic kernel with the following options selected:

Network device support -> Ethernet (1000 Mbit) -> Intel(R) PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet support

and of course:

SCSI support -> SCSI low-level drivers -> Serial ATA (SATA) support -> sata_vsc

I have successfully used both the 2.4.29 kernel tree for this as well as the 2.6.10 kernel tree... The magic is in the PCI interrupt steering of the APIC and IO-APIC... But these two really aren't doing their things unless you have APCI enabled and working.... Once you have got it going the right way, you can look in /proc/interrupts and see:

root@dell:/proc# more interrupts
           CPU0
  0:   21934005    IO-APIC-edge  timer
  1:          2    IO-APIC-edge  keyboard
  8:          1    IO-APIC-edge  rtc
  9:          0   IO-APIC-level  acpi
 18:     197698   IO-APIC-level  eth0
 22:         14   IO-APIC-level  aic7xxx
 25:      79029   IO-APIC-level  libata
NMI:          0
LOC:   21932615
ERR:          0
MIS:          0

^^^^^^ This tells you that IO-APIC is steering the
interrupts also, note the interrupt 18, 22, and 25... Usually you only see PIC interrupts to 15.... This is what made it work....

Regards and best of luck.

Dave Sims
***************************************************************************