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

[Bob Ramstad]

Painful yet somewhat amusing, I ended up slogging through this problem
as well...

# hdparm -t -T /dev/hde gave buffered disk reads around 1.5 MB/sec.  (Ugh!)

Google research indicated I should try libata and the sata_sil driver
which would make the drives appear as SCSI drives, not the siimage
driver which made the drives appear as IDE drives.  I wrestled with
this a lot, and ultimately figured out that I had to explicitly
disable the siimage driver so it wasn't built into the kernel.

To be specific, with menuconfig under "ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support" then
"IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices" DISABLE Silicon Image chipset
support so the siimage driver isn't included at all.

It's a good idea to also visit "Network device support" then "Ethernet
(10 or 100Mbit)" and enable as module "nForce Ethernet support" so the
forcedeth driver is built.

/etc/modules.conf already had both

alias scsi_hostadapter sata_sil
alias eth0 forcedeth

but without entirely removing the siimage driver from the kernel lsmod
would not show sata_sil as loaded and modprobe sata_sil would not
work.

One thing that was very cool is since all of my partitions are RAID
and/or LVM the system didn't complain at all when everything switched
from /dev/hde and /dev/hdg to /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.  I was hoping
that this would be the case, but I wasn't sure.

# hdparm -t -T /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   1652 MB in  2.00 seconds = 826.00 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  198 MB in  3.01 seconds =  65.78 MB/sec

So I was off, I thought the disks seemed about 10x too slow, it was
more like 50x...

Hope this helps somebody!

-- Bob

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 23:46:43 -0800, Bob Ramstad <rramstad at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>