SATA controller problems - IRQ's!

[Alexander Lazarevich]

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