A SATA PCI-controller card using the kernel module sata_sil24 has problems 
transferring big files.


First of all a description of the situation:

-- Hardware:
- mainboard Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H; chipset AMD 690G / SB600; 2 PCI slots
  (32 bit); 1 PCIe 4x slot; 1 PCIe 16 x slot; 8 GiB RAM; AMD Phenom(tm) II X4
  955 Processor
- SATA controller card Dawicontrol DC-3410 RAID, 32 bit PCI; chipset
  SiI3124ACBHU; BIOS message: running at 32 bit / 33 MHz
- with hard disks: HDS721616PLA380 (twice), ST3000DM001-9YN166 (temporary)
- q.v. attachment lspci; (dmidecode (v 3.0) finds no SMBIOS nor DMI entry
  point)

-- [Debian] System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (998, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.9.2 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages linux-source-4.9 depends on:
ii  binutils  2.27.90.20170113-1
ii  xz-utils  5.2.2-1.2

Versions of packages linux-source-4.9 recommends:
ii  bc                    1.06.95-9+b2
ii  gcc                   4:6.2.1-1
ii  libc6-dev [libc-dev]  2.24-8
ii  make                  4.1-9

Versions of packages linux-source-4.9 suggests:
ii  libncurses5-dev [ncurses-dev]  6.0+20161126-1
pn  libqt4-dev                     <none>
pn  pkg-config                     <none>


1st test setting:
Reading from the disks to /dev/null with
		dd if=/dev/sde of=/dev/null bs=4k count=2304k
one after the other. (Disk ST3000DM001 was temporarily directly connected to 
the card's external SATA port.)
Result: After some MB, but before 470 MiB errors occurred:
	failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
		[cf. attachment dmesg]
	failed command: READ DMA
		[cf. attachment dmesg_tmpHD]
The errors were reproducible - however, they started after different amounts 
of data.

2nd test setting:
Using Debian's kernel and patching the driver to not use 64 bit DMA [cf. 
attachment sata_sil24.c.diff].
Doing the same tests as above.
Result: Repeatedly no errors occurred.


N.B.: 1) There is a Windows Vista (32 bit) installation that uses two of the 
ports of the controller card as a fake RAID 1: There are no problems with the 
internal directly connected drives nor with an external drive.
2) Prior to this controller card there was a PCI Express card using SiI 3132, 
that - if I remember rightly - also had such problems, but they started after 
a greater amount of data. (At that time a Windows XP x64 installation had no 
problems, too.)


If you need or want additional information or tests, let me know.

Matthias