[WBEL-users] ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Si3112A SATA

[Bob Ramstad]

Hi there.  Now I've got the Ethernet working with forcedeth, I'm
running into problems with the Silicon Image S3112A SATA built in on
the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard.

Respin2 allows me to install WBEL3 on the disks no problem, and I can
partition them and so on.  That said, performance is *abysmal* --
easily one tenth the speed of standard IDE, perhaps worse.

The disks are showing up as /dev/hde and /dev/hdg.

The system seems to be using the old "siimage" driver which is built
in to the kernel and has all sorts of bugs, notably a serious problem
with disks larger than 133 GB.

I've been trying to figure out how to get libata to be used instead
via a recompile of the latest WBEL3 kernel, but have had no luck.  I
get unresolved symbol errors when compiling and the modules will not
load with modprobe or insmod.  From the reading I've done, it's pretty
clear that libata is the way to go.

So, I'm kind of at a loss.  To me, this hardware isn't cutting edge at
all, the motherboard in question was released well over a year ago,
but I keep getting stymied.

Any suggestions more than welcome.  These boards are very very common
and I have to believe that someone out there has had success getting
SATA to work.  (Note that I don't care at all about the RAID support
in the chipset, I just want the drives to show up as /dev/hdX or
/dev/sdX so I can work with them, and I'd expect performance on par
with regular IDE drives or better -- not worse...)

If WBEL4 was available I'd probably just start over with it, and
figure there'd be some learning curve but that at least I wouldn't be
wasting my time getting old software to run on new hardware which is
what I feel like with WBEL3 Respin2...  I feel like I'm just trying to
put a round peg in a square hole.

I have an emotional problem with CentOS or I'd probably just d/l
CentOS 4 and be done with it.  I do not like the way the CentOS guys
have come on this mailing list in the past and said bad things about
WBEL...  just an attitude issue, really.

-- Bob