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watersb
Apprentice
Joined: 04 Sep 2002
Posts: 297
Location: take a left turn in Tesuque
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 Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 1:26 am Post subject: Promise SATA (serial ATA) TX2plus JUST WORKS! |
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Today I received a Promise Serial ATA TX2plus controller and a 160GB Seagate Serial ATA hard disk from http://www.newegg.com
I had compiled in the PROMISE_SATA drivers under SCSI/low-level drivers in my 2.6.0-test11 kernel.
The hardware installed very easily. The cables are very small. Very nice!
I also installed a Kingwin KT2 plastic removable tray, it fits in a 5.25-inch external bay and I can swap the drive out with another one.
Plugged everything in, powered up my Gentoo system, issued modprobe promise_sata and BOOM! I had a new hard disk! Looks like SCSI to the system, /dev/sda
It just worked!
Hot-plug, however, does NOT work for me; the system LOCKED UP when I removed the disk and then re-inserted it.
Newegg part numbers for your reference:
16-102-014 Promise SATA Controller, TX2plus
17-121-114 Kingwin removable drive rack & tray
22-148-018 Seagate ST3160023AS SATA 160GB disk
I also ordered
12-104-652 SATA power adapter cable
which I did NOT need, as the drive tray takes a traditional molex power cable from the computer power supply.
The Promise TX2 came with the SATA drive cables.
SWEET! (now if could only figure out hot plug...) |
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Angrybob
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Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Posts: 575
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watersb
Apprentice
Joined: 04 Sep 2002
Posts: 297
Location: take a left turn in Tesuque
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2003 3:54 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for these pointers.
I should mention that HOTSWAP DOES WORK.
That is, as long as you are not accessing the drive when you pull it out! 
Today, I tried another experiment, where I cleanly unmounted everything, performed a sync, and then waited a couple of seconds... THEN I used my hot-swap tray enclosure's switch to turn off the drive and remove it. I waited a bit, and then replaced the drive, powered it up, mounted it again, and was able to access the drive NO PROBLEM!
WITHOUT reboot or power-down or anything; other processes continued to run.
That's hot-swap enough for me! 
I think that, when in the documentation etc. it says that "hot-swap is not yet supported by libata", they mean that hotplug events are not generated by the kernel driver.
So you have to perform a manual procedure; the system does not pay attention when you install a new disk.
But it hot-swaps enough for me to implement my disk-rotation scheme! No more tape backups! |
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Angrybob
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Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Posts: 575
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 4:59 pm Post subject: |
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| watersb wrote: | as long as you are not accessing the drive when you pull it out!
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eek!! that cant have been good for your drive ... yeah i wouldnt expect it to work without unmounting the drive first  |
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taskara
Advocate
Joined: 10 Apr 2002
Posts: 3763
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 10:40 pm Post subject: |
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| Angrybob wrote: | | watersb wrote: | as long as you are not accessing the drive when you pull it out!
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eek!! that cant have been good for your drive ... yeah i wouldnt expect it to work without unmounting the drive first |
the drive will be fine, it's your data that may have a problem 
serial ata is natively hot swappable, so u don't even need special cages etc. but when I read your post I was like "make sure you're not accessing the drive!!" then I read further down and realised you found that out
secondly, serial ata works beautifully in 2.6 series kernels.. it's the card's raid function that doesn't.. (but linux software raid does)
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Kororaa install method - have Gentoo up and running quickly and easily, fully automated with an installer! |
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Heretic
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 03 Jul 2002
Posts: 114
Location: Austin, TX USA
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| Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 1:05 am Post subject: Re: Promise SATA (serial ATA) TX2plus JUST WORKS! |
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| watersb wrote: | | SWEET! (now if could only figure out hot plug...) |
libata doesn't support hotswap yet. This is from the linux-ide list:
*EDIT* Noticed the comment about not support hot-plug events. Since you're bridging the SATA connection, the system never sees it being swapped. Cool, I'ma buy two of those Kingwin enclosures now.
Can you hot-swap a disk from a RAID1 2-disk setup?
| Jeff Garzik wrote: |
Date: 12/03/03 08:44 pm
Editor's preface: This is clearly a first draft, only covering the basics. In order for this document to be effective, I request that users and developers send me (or post) their SATA driver questions and issues. I will do my best to address them here.
Serial ATA (SATA) for Linux status report
Dec 3, 2003
Hardware support
================
Intel ICH5
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Summary: No TCQ. Looks like a PATA controller, but with a few added, non-standard SATA port controls.
libata driver status: Production, but see issue #2, #3.
drivers/ide driver status: Production, but see issue #1, #2.
Issue #1: Depending on BIOS settings, IDE driver may lock up computer when probing drives.
Issue #2: Excessive interrupts are seen in some configurations.
Issue #3: "Enhanced mode" or "SATA-only mode" may need to be set in BIOS.
Intel ICH6 ("AHCI")
-------------------
Summary: Per-device queues, full SATA control including hotplug and PM.
libata driver status: In development.
Promise
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Summary: Per-host queues on all controllers. Full SATA control including hotplug and PM on all but one controller.
libata driver status: Beta.
Silicon Image 3112
------------------
Summary: No TCQ. Looks like a PATA controller, but with full SATA control including hotplug and PM.
libata driver status: Alpha.
drivers/ide driver status: Production, but see issue #4.
Issue #4: Need to have the most recent fixes posted to lkml, for stable operation and full performance (where possible).
Broadcom/ServerWorks/Apple
--------------------------
Summary: Huge per-device queues, full SATA control including hotplug and PM.
libata driver status: Beta.
VIA
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Summary: No TCQ. Looks like a PATA controller, but with full SATA control including hotplug and PM.
libata driver status: Beta.
Software support
================
Basic Serial ATA support
------------------------
The "ATA host state machine", the core of the entire driver, is considered production-stable.
The error handling is _very_ simple, but at this stage that is an advantage. Error handling code anywhere is inevitably both complex and sorely under-tested. libata error handling is intentionally simple. Positives: Easy to review and verify correctness. Never data corruption. Negatives: if an error occurs, libata will simply send the error back the block layer. There are limited retries by the block layer, depending on the type of error, but there is never a bus reset.
Or in other words: "it's better to stop talking to the disk than compound existing problems with further problems."
As Serial ATA matures, and host- and device-side errata become apparent, the error handling will be slowly refined. I am planning to work with a few (kind!) disk vendors, to obtain special drives/firmwares that allow
me to inject faults, and otherwise exercise error handling code.
Queueing support
----------------
Even though some SATA host controllers on the market already support command queueing (a.k.a. "TCQ"), libata does not yet support it.
However, libata was designed from the ground-up to support queueing, so I need only change a few lines of code, and write two functions, to enable this behavior.
Queueing will be enabled in libata soon, but to do so requires a long stretch of testing on a large variety of controllers and drives. This is very time-intensive, and is the largest part of this task.
Tangent: Host-based queueing and Native Command Queueing
Queueing is the process of sending multiple commands to a single device, without waiting for prior commands to finish. This increases performance and reduces latency. There are three types of queueing in
the ATA world:
1) "legacy TCQ" -- some PATA devices support this. Just ignore it, it's going away.
2) "host-based TCQ" -- the host controller supports a queue of drive commands, whether or not the drive supports it.
3) "Native Command Queueing" -- both host and drive cooperate in the queueing and execution of drive commands. This should provide the highest performance and lowest latency of all three options.
#1 is support by drivers/ide _only_. libata will not support this.
#2 will soon be supported by libata.
#3 will be supported by libata when hardware is available from drive manufacturers.
Hotplug support
---------------
All SATA is hotplug.
libata does not support hotplug... yet.
Power Management support
------------------------
Over and above the power management specified in the ATA/ATAPI specification, one can aggressively control the power consumption of SATA hosts, the SATA bus, and the SATA device.
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