SATA controller problems - IRQ's!

Alexander Lazarevich alazarev at itg.uiuc.edu
Sat Apr 2 04:01:29 UTC 2005


On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Pete Nesbitt wrote:

> On Friday 01 April 2005 12:09 pm, Alexander Lazarevich wrote:
>> I'm trying to install a SATA drive into my RHEL3-AS system but am having
>> lot's of problems. The mobo is the gigabyte GA-7VAX with most recent BIOS
>> (F13), which does not have onboard SATA. So I've got a PCI-SATA controller
>> in a PCI slot, it's the SIIG SC-SAT212 (two channel SATA, non-RAID), which
>> has the SIL 3112 chip in it. The drive is IBM 400GB. Both the SATA adapter
>> and card are known good, they work fine in windows.
>>
>> But in RHEL3-AS, the drive shows up as /dev/hda, and I can fdisk the drive
>> just fine, but as soon as I try to create a filesystem on /dev/hda1, the
>> system IRQ's start going beserk, and the load goes up to 7-8, and the
>> system is unusable. I can wait for the mkfs to finish, but then any time I
>> access the new filesystem, the system IRQ's go nuts again (75-90% usage).
>>
>> What is the deal with SATA controllers and IRQ's in linux?
>>
>> Anyone have an idea if it's a driver issue? If so, where can I download
>> the right driver? Or do I have to install with a special option?
>>
>> By the way, I also tried RHEL4-AS, and FC3, and those as well have the
>> same IRQ problem.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Alex
>
> Hi,
> What other drives are on the box?
> It is interesting that the SATA drive is showing up as the first PATA drive. I
> have a couple Seagate SATA's on an ASUS board and built similar on an ABIT
> board. In both cases the controller was a VIA onboard and in both cases the
> drives show up as scsi (such as /dev/sda1 ). I have no special args in
> grub.conf

Hmm, that's true, now that you mention it. All my other linux boxed have 
onboard sata controllers and they are /dev/sda's, not hda's. The Suse 
system is showing it as an sda as well though, and it works fine in Suse.

I'm pretty sure it's a driver issue related to it being a PCI vs. onboard 
controller. No big deal, this machine can be Suse. I just like RH better.

>
> This may sound ridiculous, but are you sure the hda is the SATA drive?

Heh, not that I don't make those kind of mistakes, but heck yeah it's SATA 
dude!

> Here are a few outputs from my box:
> (system has only 2 disk drives, both SATA, and an IDE dvd burner that shows up
> as /dev/hdc)
>
> cat /proc/scsi/scsi
> Attached devices:
> Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
>   Vendor: ATA      Model: ST3200822AS      Rev: 3.01
>   Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05
> Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
>   Vendor: ATA      Model: ST3200822AS      Rev: 3.01
>   Type:   Direct-Access
> (..trimmed)
>
> egrep -i "scsi|sda|sata" /etc/modprobe.conf
> alias scsi_hostadapter sata_via
>
> lsmod|egrep -i "scsi|sda|sata"
> sata_via                8389  9
> libata                 49737  1 sata_via
> scsi_mod              152217  3 usb_storage,libata,sd_mod
>
> Hope that helps

Not much, but it's nice to hear from someone when I post. Thanks! Anyway, 
problem is solved for now. I doubt I'll run accross another mobo without 
built in SATA ever again... I hope...

Later,

Alex




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