Serial ATA (Silicon Image 3112 chipset) installation woes

totsubo · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2003 Posts: 3

Im trying to start an installation of Gentoo following the online instructions but Gentoo freezes up at the file system creation step.

Specifically when I do a mke2fs -j /dev/hde1 the creation proceeds until I get this message and then the whole system locks up:

"Writing superblock and file system accounting information: _"

I'm using a Western Digital serial ATA HD, the WD360 (Raptor) and a generic serial ATA adapter board with the Silicon Image 3112 chipset) (http://www.kuroutoshikou.com/products/serialata/serialata-pci.html)

When I first boot up the PC a message comes up from the serial ATA controller board saying that it detected my HD on interface 1 and nothing on interface 2.

Gentoo loads from CD and properly detects the serial ATA controller board and my hard drive. I can even use fdisk to write partitions to the HD. However trying to create a file system causes the system to lock up. Even Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing; I have to manual cycle the power.

This is my first try at installing Gentoo and so far I haven't gotten very far

What can I do to solve this problem?

Thanks,

Jean-Christian Imbeault

Garbz · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 2:58 am Post subject:

don't forget to reboot after partitioning. Raid controllers like the sil3112 don't like ur hdds much otherwise!
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totsubo · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2003 Posts: 3

It's not a raid controller and I am using only one HD.

I've been able to get the installation going by using ide=noudma (I thik that was the option?) at boot time. But my HD performance is horrible.

hdparm says I get 1.5 Mbs ... horrible.

Hopefully after compiling a kernel it will be able to better use my HD??

Thansk

Garbz · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 3:34 am Post subject:

you should genreally reboot after partitioning anyway.

the noudma option disables DMA (obvious) so naturally you get pretty crap performance. I don't think that that will solve ur problem though.
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Every begining is another begining's end.

Garbz · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 4:03 am Post subject:

but just a little research into my own problem shows that the Silicon image 3112 driver is broken and doens't work for dma atm

So ur going to have to put up with the 1.5mb/s for the moment, and i'm probably stuck without gentoo for a while :cry:

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Every begining is another begining's end.

totsubo · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2003 Posts: 3

Thanks for the info. How did you find out that it is broken? Do you have any idea when it might be fixed?

Without dma using this drive is pretty pointless

Garbz · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 9:06 am Post subject:

I found out the driver is broken from another linux forum. It seems that everyone is having problems with this drive with and without loading the sil3112 or silraid modules.

it seems it won't work at all if mutilword dma or above transfers are used at the moment but it is being looked into and will no doubt be fixed pretty soon considering the number of motherboards which come with this chipset on board now.
_________________
Every begining is another begining's end.

cyrillic · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 10:56 pm Post subject:

The SiI3112 controller chip is not very well supported yet, but ac-sources (2.4.x kernels) and mm-sources (2.6.x kernels) do have working drivers that support DMA.

mickwd · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 70

I've also got the SiI3112 working almost perfectly now in both the ac-sources (2.4.22-r1) and development-sources kernels.

However, this is with a non-RAID setup (i.e. only a single SATA disk).

Earlier versions of 2.4 kernels had a lot of problems with this driver, so go for at least ac-sources-2.4.22-r1 (which enables DMA on boot-up).

You might get a 30-second pause on boot-up while the kernel looks for a second SATA drive. If so, boot with "hdg=noprobe" (hdg in my case is the second SATA device).

hdparm gives a throughput of about 48 MB/s with ac-sources, slightly slower with development-sources (about 42 MB/s).

MUCH better than using it without DMA.

teknik0s · n00b Joined: 26 May 2003 Posts: 72 Location: Texas

so are you getting full performance out of the drive? what is the speed the raptor is supposed to run at? I get the 30 second pause right now. im going to try hooking up my other hard drive (a 60gb maxtor, via the IDE to SATA connector) that came with my Abit NF7-S mobo.