nforce2, sil3112A, hdd activity led not working?

jsosic

I have NF7-S mobo, and my hdd activity led isn't working with SATA drives. I've been trying both libata nad scsi SATA drivers in kernel with no luck. When I boot Windows, LED registeres hdd activity, as when I read cd/dvd roms both in Linux and Windows.

I guess windows drivers have support for the activity led, and linux kernel drivers have not. Has anyone encounter souch issues on nForce2 mobo's with Sil3112A controller and SATA hdd's?

swanson · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 10:19 am Post subject:

There is a kernel patch to add support for the HDD activity light on Silicon Image 3112 SATA chips by Aric Cyr after he'd wanted blinky flashing lights too.
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Alan.

jsosic · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 12:20 pm Post subject:

This is a patch for SATA driver, and drives are then recognized as SCSI devices (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb). That way, I can't access SMART information from the disk and more important, I can't spin it down.

I now use kernel ATA driver for my Silicone Image chip. Drives are recognized as /dev/hde & /dev/hdg, and I can monitor SMART status, do SMART self tests and spin down disks with noflushd. I wouldn't want to miss all this just for the sake of flashing LED

swanson · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 7:08 pm Post subject:

The libata drivers are the SCSI SATA drivers (and also progressing towards being PATA drivers too thanks to Alan Cox) whereas you're referring to and using the IDE drivers.

Anyway, it should probably be possible to backport the patch with a wee bit of work although a quick look through the siimage.c code suggests it'll have be inserted somewhere else. If I have time, I might give it a closer look.
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Alan.

Septor · Apprentice Joined: 01 Sep 2004 Posts: 150

SMART and spindown stuff will be (or might already be) added to the latest libata sata core. The IDE sata driver is pretty outdated, but if it works, hey who am I to complain

Check out the official libata status page at: http://linux-ata.org/software-status.html
Looks like SMART and sleeping should be in 2.6.15 and newer kernels already...

As for blinky-blinky flashy LEDs, I will be uploading a new patch for 2.6.15+ kernels as the one on my homepage currently is broken for newer kernels.