Re: siimage and two nics

["J. Ryan Earl" <heretic@clanhk.org>]

>If I boot with the siimage module builtin, the kernel doesn't
>find the root device (set to /dev/hda2).
>  
>

You can't use the Via sata for the root device?  It's off the slow PCI 
bus, it'll be much faster anyway.

>As a workaround, I now skip the siimage module entirely, and only
>load the sata_via and sata_sil modules.  This makes all 4 SATA
>drives come alive as sda, sdb etc, leaving hda untouched.  I get
>50 MB/s with hdparm -tT, so it seems to work fine.
>  
>
Be careful, sata_sil is broken.  It is not stable, and has failed every 
stress test I've tried on it.  The siimage ide driver is actually stable 
around v1.09.

>New Problem:
>
>I still have a rather serious problem, also SATA related.  I want
>to have two network cards in that machine, one of them being a
>common 8139 card.  As the other one I want to use the via-rhine
>card on the motherboard.  The first network card comes alive
>without problem, but when I try to do "ifconfig eth1 up", the
>entire machine comes to a complete stop.  Not even Caps Lock work,
>and I have to power cycle it.  Two 8139 cards have the same effect.
>Removing the Silicon Image card makes it work fine.  How do I do
>to get some debug information on what happens?
>
>Here is the output from lspci -v.
>  
>
dmesg?  '/proc/version'?  newest bios?  move the sata card to a new pci 
slot?

-ryan