Re: libata problems on Promise SX4000 controller

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I had problems getting my Promise SX4000 controller to run with libata.
> First, I noticed libata refused to drive it (no associated PCI id). After
> patching that (including the handler for the right chipset), a
> "modprobe sata_promise" hung for about 15 minutes while initializing the
> ECC RAM. It then recognized the one attached harddisk, but disk access was
> not really possible (I gave up after waiting for half an hour or so).
> Let me apologize for testing an older version of libata. At the time I had
> the problems, it was the newest available version. I enabled debugging and
> post the logs here in the hope that they might help supporting this
> controller in the future.
> 
> A note about the controller itself: It has 4 Parallel ATA ports and no
> Serial ATA ports. The controller sports the usual SoftRAID from Promise
> (0,1,0+1 and 5). The RAID5 seems to be a new feature. I do not care about
> the RAID (well, I do, I'm writing a dm configuration helper for it right
> now), but I would like to access the drive.

Well, the main problem is that you are trying to drive a PATA controller 
with a SATA driver :)

If you wanted to list this as a feature request on 
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/ that might be reasonable...

I have no idea how different the PATA controllers are from the SATA one 
I tested.  Although it does detect your device, I don't know what 
differences exist...

	Jeff