Re: SATA status report updated

[Simon Oosthoek <simon.oosthoek@ti-wmc.nl>]

Hi Rainer

Rainer Koenig wrote:
> Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> writes:
>>8) The DMA pad code is very buggy.  It uses the dma_map_single() to
>>map a buffer, but never synchronizes nor flushes the buffer.  This can
>>and will lead to data corruption, particularly on x86-64 platform.
> 
> 
> That's very bad since the target platform for that chipset is able
> to support AMD64. :-(

that was my conclusion as well!

> From your comments I've learned that my patch (just the device ID) is
> too tiny and the SiS provided patch is doing too much things that it
> shouldn't do. How can we find a solution for that? 
> 
> Would it make sense that I try to find the "goods" in the SiS patch and
> merge them somehow in the actual kernel? But: What kernel shall I take
> to do that work? The latest development kernel, the kernel of my 
> distribution (whatever this will be, sooner or later it has to work
> with all distributions) or just a kernel that is "close" to the patch
> from SiS, e.g. 2.6.10? 
> 
> As I mentioned before, getting hardware to try out patches wouldn't be
> that big deal since I'm located in a PC factory and I can get test 
> machines if needed. What would be good tests to e.g. detect the problems
> that you mentioned above? Are there hardware specific tests for SATA
> hard disks around? I would be very interested in that since testing 
> also under Linux will become daily work for me and my colleauges from
> the system test department.

I'll be happy to test patches that come up. I'm currently running 
2.6.13-rc6-mm1, because it also has the sis190 ethernet driver in it, 
which actually does work :-)

Unfortunately I'm not able to check the logic of the driver, because 
although I can read C, I'm totally unfamiliar with the disk controler 
logic in the kernel...

Cheers

Simon