Re: kern/37826: Kernel sees only one SATA channel (out of four) on Abit AN52 motherboard (nvidia nf520__single chip)

[David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 12:04:50AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
 > On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 02:43:37AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
 >  > On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 03:10:00AM +0000, develunix%gmail.com@localhost 
 > wrote:
 >  >  > NetBSD only sees one SATA channel out of four. The BIOS sees the
 >  >  > two hard drives plugged into two of the four hardware interfaces.
 >  > 
 >  > Possibly, duplicate of 38011 - does the patch therein help?
 > 
 > For the record, it appears that it isn't and it doesn't, respectively;
 > I have a machine with the same viaide (nForce MCP65) and I've finally
 > had some time to tinker with it, without result.

The solution to this problem (and also the interrupt routing/ACPI
problems I've been having with the same viaide) is to run it in AHCI
mode. Setting it in the BIOS and including ahcisata(4) in the kernel
JFW.

(Well, except that it has the problem where occasionally one of the
disks probes as a few kilobytes long, but I think that's a known issue
with ahcisata.)

I have my doubts as to whether MCP65 (and later, too) will ever work
properly except as AHCI; the Linux and FreeBSD drivers both probe it
and immediately enable AHCI mode. I suspect, for people who don't have
a BIOS setting, that we ought to teach ahcisata_pci.c to do that, and
take the PCI ids out of viaide.c so we don't try to run it as viaide.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost