Tejun Heo wrote:
Jeff Breidenbach wrote:
I read with interest I. Straford's current trials and tribulations
with the Promise SATA300 TX4. Do people have a favorite
alternative to this card that plays well with Linux? I've read the
chipset compatibility list, but am not sure how to boil that
information down to an actual buyable SATA controller.
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-ide@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg12398.html
http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html
It's a sort of a difficult question to answer but I think it'll be nice
to develop a standard answer to this kind of question and put it on
linux-ata.org so that users can choose. It can also hopefully work as
another pressure for vendors to enhance their linux support.
Anyways, here are what I know.
* ata_piix: Although it lacks shiny new features (interface limitation),
it should work pretty well. No known serious bugs.
* ahci: Well supported. Command switching PMP support is merged for
2.6.24 too. Many (if not most) vendors now use ahci as programming
interface for storage controllers, so ahci driver supports lots of
controllers from many vendors. Bugginess depends on which vendor or
chip you're actually using but in general all are well supported and if
you report a problem, it's very likely to get fixed soon.
* sata_sil: 3112 chips have problem with early seagate drives but both
3112 itself and those drives have been discontinued for a long time now.
There are reports of data corruption when 3114 is connected to mobos
with NVidia chipsets. This is still being investigated. If you're on
intel mobo, 3112/3114/3512 should work good.
* sata_sil24: 3124/3132 chips don't have any outstanding serious
problems. IRQ loss on PCI-X was the only recent serious known problem
but it's fixed now. These chips are pretty advanced and all the
advanced features are supported by Linux including FIS switching PMP
support (will be included in 2.6.24 release); however, there is a known
hardware performance limitation so you can't use full SATA bandwidth
even if you use PMP but it's more than sufficient for most cases and
this chip is my personal favorite.
* sata_promise: Generally works okay; however there are still some
problems with recent 3Gbps chips. (Mikael, please pitch in)
* sata_nv: Generally works okay but ADMA support still seems to have
some problems (Robert?).
There aren't many in the way of specific known problems that aren't
worked around. There was a hotplug issue that was reported (kernel bug
8421), but only seems to happen on a certain revision of MSI Neo4
Platinum board so I suspect it's a board issue. Also there's the
ATAPI/>4GB RAM issue that's being debugged. But I haven't seen many
reports pointing to driver problems.
As far as the poster's question, these controllers are all built into
the chipset, so it's not really relevant to their issue..
* sata_inic162x: Has half-working driver. We need more info from the
vendor to proceed further. Stay away from it for now.
* sata_via: Works okay. No known serious problems but the chip is
quirky and not too dependable when errors occur.
* marvell ones: I don't have much idea. Jeff? Mark?
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