Re: Status of Promise drivers?

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

Daniel Brahneborg wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm having serious problems with my Silicon Image SATA card,
> and am considering replacing with a (more expensive) Promise
> SATA TX2 Plus card.
> 
> First I have some questions, to avoid getting into the same
> mess as I'm in now.
> 
>  1. What is the status of the Promise driver?  Stable for
>     everybody? (The SI3112 has problems for some people when
>     using the IDE driver, and for some with the SCSI driver.)
>     A binary module is ok, a binary bzImage definately is not.

It's beta, and stable.


>  2. Has anybody used the driver on an Abit KV7 motherboard?
> 
>  3. Has anybody used it with *2* network cards?  Bonus
>     points for the builtin Via Rhine and an 8139 card.
>     (The SCSI driver for the SI3112 kills the machine when a
>     second card is activated.)
> 
>  4. Has anybody used it together with two other disks on the
>     VIA SATA interface on the KV7?
> 
>  5. Has anybody used it for a Raid5 setup? (With SI3112 Raid1
>     works better than Raid5, since Raid5 gives corrupted files
>     all over the place and Raid1 only corrupts them once in
>     a while.)

Any comparison with Silicon Image is false.  The Silicon Image driver 
has been repeatedly stated (by me, the author) to be BROKEN.  It is 
thusly marked with CONFIG_BROKEN.

Those who ignore the author stating the Silicon Image driver is _alpha_ 
and unfinished do so at their own risk.


>  6. Has anybody used it in a non-root setup, having hda on
>     the PATA interface?  (The SI3112 causes lots of problems
>     with I/O port and IRQ conflicts, requiring hours of
>     tweaking of the boot parameters.)

PATA interfaces on Promise SATA are not yet supported.


>  7. Do you have DMA enabled?  (SI3112 without DMA works fine,
>     but with terrible performance.)

DMA cannot be disabled :)


>  8. Do you get decent performance? (The 5MB/sec I get without
>     DMA on the SI3112 card is _not_ decent.)

Performance is far beyond this.

	Jeff