Chuck Swiger wrote:
Karl Denninger wrote:
On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 12:46:04AM +0200, S?ren Schmidt wrote:
[ ... ]
I've already gone WAY out of my way to try to support the sii3112,
and I'm not inclined to waste more of my precious spare time on it.
However, if it really is that important to enough people to try to
workaround the silicon bugs (which very likely isn't possible), get
together and get me failing HW on my desk and time to work on it.
Ok, then do the RIGHT THING and document that the SiI chips are declared
BROKEN by FreeBSD and likely to cause people trouble - including
irrevocable data corruption.
This would have saved me COUNTLESS hours when I first ran into this
issue. Indeed, it was not until someone else started posting
excerpts from commit logs (months after I filed the PR originally!)
that I was aware FreeBSD developers considered these chipsets
"damaged goods".
Look, Karl, we're all as sorry as we can be that you've spent lots of
time on this issue and/or you've had data get corrupted. You should
not rely on that sympathy to be endless.
FreeBSD attempts to document that it works with common hardware which
follows industry standards and is not otherwise broken. The
information available to me suggests the SiI 3112 is broken. It has
multiple hardware defects involving ATA request-size handling (SIIBUG
in ata_sii_allocate() in dev/ata/ata-chipset.c around line ~2300, or
what the Linux guys call SIL_QUIRK_MOD15WRITE), and with LBA48 if used
with various Seagate drives.
Does it work with Linux? Does it work with any of the *BSD? Does it work
with Windows XP? So what answer do we give when discussions about OS
selection is done? "Well, FreeBSD is really a rock solid OS, if you
cherry pick
prime hardware, and can configure it...." And they answer, XP installs and
runs. Linux installs and runs. So as I said in a previous note, is
FreeBSD
going down the Sun Microsystems path? "We work really, really well, but
only on
prime server grade hardware...."
Is the Via 8235 controller for PATA broken? It and it's brothers are on
9 gazillion Athlon mainboards. That's what I get the DMA_READ and
DMA_WRITE errors on.
I've got an older Soyo MB that I had intended to use as household
fileserver.
It has a Via 8233 for PATA and a promise 20265 raid controller. How
likely
are these to work? The 8233 is listed as supported by the ata driver,
but so
was the 8237 that's in my desktop machine. Is support going to be spotty
for that older chipset? The Promise 20265 is supported by 4.11, but does
not appear to be in 5.4 or 6.0. Yeah this is older hardware, but it's not
that old.
[ ...some 200 (!) lines of ranting at poor Soren deleted :-)... ]
I haven't seen a diatribe like this one since those green JPCON
capacitors which leaked and fried motherboards everywhere, or maybe
even since those old KT266 motherboards, which were supposed to do 4x
AGP but would lock up hard when some slavering gamer tried to make his
$500 new 4x AGP card go.
You get diatribes when you ignore problems users are having. The
fact that you have broken the Principle of Least Surprise makes
it worse. The fact that you appear to not care, that the only
answers are "we decided that it's broken, so we aren't going do
anything with it..." or "Well try using Current." Damn it, once
upon a time Stable was stable, and and you used Current at your
own risk. Now we are being told that what we thought was
stable isn't working and we must use cutting edge software to
try to get a stable system.
Finally you get diatribes when users are trying to get your attention.
I could have installed Fedora on my desktop several months ago.
I would have freed up a bunch of time. My wife wouldn't have to
listen to gripe and curse as I searched mailing list archives and web
sites trying to find an answer. The WinXP machine on desk would
have been sent on it's way and a Unix box would be there.
Anyway, yeah, you got it: some SII chipsets don't work right.
FreeBSD tries to compensate; for some people it works OK for what they
are doing, and for others it doesn't. Blow $25 and get a cheap 4-port
SATA-150 RAID card using something other than a SiI 3112. Blow $50
and you can even get one from a vendor like Promise or Highpoint
that's at least somewhat reputable, and/or provides open source
drivers and FreeBSD support for their products.
So I should support a pr to change the docs for the Via chipsets for
PATA drives. "Warning! Used to work, may or may not work with
current Stable systems."
John
----------------------------------------------------------------------
John T. Farmer Owner & CTO GoldSword Systems
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 865-691-6498 Knoxville TN
Consulting, Design, & Development of Networks & Software
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