SATA controller problems - IRQ's!

Pete Nesbitt pete at linux1.ca
Sat Apr 2 03:11:16 UTC 2005


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

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

On a (loosely) related note, I found out the hard way that the "onboard raid' 
is like a raid controller version of a WinModem and as far as i can tell, 
does not work on Linux. (This was on a FC3 86_64 box.)

-- 
Pete Nesbitt, rhce
www.linux1.ca




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