Hello people, Now I _really_ need to bang my head on the wall... :( .... and thank all you people who responded to my cry for help... I have to admit that I have been stupid (or just a little clueless).... but I have worked the puzzle!!
It seems that sata_vsc works just fine.... My entire problem involved the PCI IRQ routing mechanism.... and my lack of understanding of the interaction between 'Loacl APIC', 'IO-APIC' and power management.... It seems that you can do what you want with 'Local APIC' and 'IO-APIC' but if you have not enabled ACPI, the APIC stuff is not enabled... and doesn't seem to do anything.... I have now enabled both ACPI and APIC (with IO-APIC) and the IRQ barking has gone away!! I had a similar problem today with another computer (ASUS MS4800-MX) where the built in Ethernet on a Via PHY chip (supported by the SiS900 driver) refused to work... In this case I booted up Knoppix which worked just fine.... and then started trying to figure out why there was a difference between knoppix and a vanilla Slackware kernel.... It seems that Slackware 9.1 does not have ACPI (or APIC or IO-APIC) enabled... Once I figured that out, it was seemed to make the SIS900 driver work so I decided to try it on the sata_vsc problem.... The result is history and everything is working as it should.... It's a shame that the knoppix 3.4 kernel doesn't probe for SATA stuff or I would probably have figured this out a week ago :( Meanwhile, a working sata_vsc allows one to turn a Dell Powervault 745N (Dell's foray into Network Attached Storage) into a good and cheap unix server with dual gig NICs and 4 SATA disks that can either be run independently or via software raid!! Cool! Thanks again for your support for and patience with me... I will be humble for a while now... ;) Dave - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
