Calling all DS10 / DS10L owners!

[Jason Thorpe <thorpej%me.com@localhost>]

Folks —

I recently nabbed a cheap slightly-beat-up-but-working DS10L because I want to get to the bottom of “why does IDE DMA not work properly on this machine?”.

(See alpha/alpha/dec_6600.c rev 1.38 were I disabled IDE DMA for the DS10-type machines based on reports of “no va”.)

I installed a 500G OWC SATA SSD in it with a PATA <-> SATA adaptron.

I spent some time digging only to determine that there is a large gap in the knowledge of WTF is going on with the rev 0xC1 ALi M5229 that’s installed in the machine.  I mean, I did learn that these IDE controllers are kind of terrible, to be sure, but not much enlightenment about the specific problem observed.

I did, however, discover two things:

- Yes, PIO mode really sucks, especially because the drive I installed can’t do multi-sector PIO.  SO MANY INTERRUPTS.

- Hey, even though it defaults to UDMA mode 2 and expels its lunch onto the floor, if I force it to UDMA mode 1, it seems to work ok.

I ran a bunch of file system data integrity tests on it overnight and all day, and everything seems .. fine?  So I’d like to check in a change to aceride.c that forces it down to UDMA 1 for rev 0xC1 chips, and re-enables IDE DMA at the DS10 platform level.

But I would love to have more people give it a spin.

If you have a DS10 and are willing to give this a whirl, hit me up off-list.

Merci d’avance!

-- thorpej