cdrw/dvd driver lockup / Silicon Image 3114 SATA Performance

[hayward-redhat at loup.net]

Hi Ken,

 > There has recently been significant discussion of issues just like this on 
 > the fedora-test-list - this may be something FC3 specific (or 
 > recent-kernel-specific).
 > 
 > Last I saw, Alan Cox was poking into the issue further.

After getting FC3 x86_64 up and running, if I put a disk in the
cdrw/dvd drive it immediately locks the entire kernel hard.

These problems were exhibited with the cdrw/dvd as the only device on
the bus and these newer drives are designed to cable select anyway, so
it is not an installation problem.  Even if it were an installation
problem or defective drive, it shouldn't hard lock the kernel like
that.  Now that I have FC3 running, this is clearly a driver issue.

Glad to see ac is looking into this and it isn't just me.

The sata_sil and sata_promise drivers now actually work without
crashing, although the performance is limited to an anemic 90MB/s on
my Tyan S2882's Sil3114 chipset.  Even though it supports four drives,
I can max out the bandwidth with two since just one of my Maxtors will
deliver about 57MB/s sequential read.  This is very disappointing as
the S2882 bus speeds should be able to handle at least 400MB/s to and
from the Sil3114.  It would appear Tyan has crippled their motherboard
with a crappy SATA chipset.  I plan to run eight drives off of this
machine so I'll have to experiment with dual pci-x four port sata
cards.  The Promise SATA150 TX4 card I put in has a driver that sucks
way less cpu and spanks the Silicon Image chipset / driver.. I get the
full 116MB/s out of my two SATA drives doing sequential read here.

Thanks for the help.

- Mike