SATA Sil3112. How to properly install OS with this driver?

[Tekchip 0]

I've looked through the rest of the SATA related posts but none of them seem to address the issue of running RAID0 with linux. In windows at the very start of the setup you can put down the SIL3112 driver and windows install will see the pair of drives as one large hard drive. When I attempt to install Redhat 9(shrike) it sees them as seperate drives in the partitioning screen. I have all ready downloaded the drivers for the controller from Asus(my mbd is a a7n8x deluxe). These drivers only come in rpm form for rh7.3, rh7.3-athlon and suse8.0. In my experience most 7.3 compatable programs/drivers will work just fine with newer versions of redhat.

 

This brings me to the real question. Is there some way to install drivers for the sil3112 controller pre-setup? If so how is this to be done since no rpm dbase is available to install them into? If there's some other method please let me know! Thanks in advance!

[roarl 0]

I have installed SuSE 8.2 (kernel 2.4.20) on a brand new machine with a7n8x deluxe mbo and a Seagate SATA disk. The disk controller (ide2) is recognized as SATA, but is set up in PIO mode during boot. Furthermore, the machine crashes if I try to enable DMA with hdparm. The result is an agonizing 1.3 MB/s tranfer rate. Any ideas?

 

The driver for sil3112 from Asus that you mentioned sounds promising, but I can't find it. All I found for a7n8x deluxe for Linux was an all-in-one nForce driver, and I got that from nVidia instead. Please direct me!

 

--

roarl

[roarl 0]

Apparently, the SuSE 8.2 kernel was prepared for S-ATA, the only thing I had to do was:

 

% hdparm -X66 -d1 /dev/hde

 

Now I have 54 MB/sec. But not after a lot of tries and crashes... The difficult thing was the "-X66" bit.

[ybahotcat 0]

I download the NVIDIA drivers which worked famously and I now have sound, but I am aftaid I was also not able to find the sil3112 drivers. Any chance of some pointers ???

[Tekchip 0]

After rather large amounts of research here's what I've found. Apparently as mentioned earlier in the thread the Suse 8.2 kernel is SATA ready and will work. However normal earlier kernels(Redhat 9, Mandrake9.1) 2.4.x arnt SATA ready. SATA support is available in the newer 2.5.x kernel. So basically unless your comfortable recompiling a 2.4.x kernel to support SATA on the Sil3112 then you'll need to go with Suse or wait till the next versions of Mandrake and Redhat. I personally am going to go with Suse simply because I'm impatient and havn't quite gotten comfortable with recompiling a kernel yet. Hopefully this info helps you out.

[ybahotcat 0]

I downloaded the latest updates for Redhat 9. I did try re-compiling the kernel but it kept on erroring on the SATA part, because it didn't seem to have a driver, which is why when I saw your first reply I thought I was on to a winner.

 

If you hear of any more info then let me know.

 

Thanks

[Tekchip 0]

There is software, I believe a kernel patch, with support for the Sil3112 available that needs to be compiled into the 2.4x kernel. I had the link before accidently killing my last linux install so it'll take me some time to find the link for it again. I'll get back to you soon with the location to that.

[Tekchip 0]

As promised here's the link with the patch software or at least a discussion of the patch software as well as a link to where to get the patch. Here's the link:

 

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/51535

 

As mentioned earlier Suse8.2 must all ready have that patch applied to it. And according to other reading I've done the 2.5(unstable kernel) and 2.6(stable kernel) both have the support built into them. Word on the street is that 2.6 should be released very soon.

[Tekchip 0]

bump

[colm1 0]

Hi,

 

I've got an ASUS P4P800Deluxe with onboard SATA and a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB SATA drive connected to it.

 

I've been trying to install Mandrake 9.1 with kernel 2.4.21 and get the 'no valid devices on which to create the filesystems' error.

 

From the above posts i get the impression that this isn't a driver issue and that i need a newer kernel?

 

Could anyone give some advice because I'm totally at a loss!

 

Thanks

Colm

 

 

edit: P.S. I think it might be a problem with linux support for the ICH5R chipset and /or the 82801ER controller on the mobo?????

[Tekchip 0]

Right now the 2.4 kernel doesnt support SATA with out a patch to the kernel. At the moment if you want a kernel with that all ready built in you have to run with Suse 8.2 or newer. If your competent at recompiling kernels then you can either get the kernel module and recompile your current kernel or you can download and compile any one of the test/beta 2.5 or 2.6 kernels. Only catch is that the current module doesnt support raid on SATA for most raid chipsets which leaves me at a loss. Any way those are your choices unfortunately. Kernel 2.6 is going to rock the house, hang in there.

[colm1 0]

Thanks for your reply!

 

I think it's best for me to wait for 2.6 to be honest, but its good to know why I couldn't get it working.

 

Colm

[shahfik 0]

Anyone tried SATA RAID on a Promise PDC 20319 with Intel S875WP1LX motherboard?

 

Would Suse 8.2 work the same with PDC 20319 as it does with a Si 3112 RAID controller?

[devhen 0]

I keep hearing this 'kernel 2.4.x doesn't support SATA' stuff everywhere but I'm afraid that I was able to install Red Hat 9 (2.4.20-8 ) using my mobo's Silicon Image iI 3112 SATA controller just fine. Red Hat found my hard drive immediately and the only problem I'm having is that it seems to be running slowly. When I'm moving/copying large files my system becomes completely usesless (choppy mouse movements, apps won't launch) and on top of that data seems to be being read/written slower than it should be. Does anybody know how I can get SATA to work as well and as fast as IDE? I'm using an IDE to SATA converter on my hard drive. Is this the problem (I'm pretty sure its not, but...)

[Admiral LSD 0]

Try the hdparm command mentioned earlier in the thread, that should help a bit. What's happening is that it might be detecting the controller but it's not setting the correct DMA mode resulting in the effect you describe. If you don't want to have to enter the command every time you log in open up the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local (I think that's where it is, my memory of Red Hat is fading fast) and add it to the end.

[devhen 0]

Quote:

Try the hdparm command mentioned earlier in the thread, that should help a bit. What's happening is that it might be detecting the controller but it's not setting the correct DMA mode resulting in the effect you describe. If you don't want to have to enter the command every time you log in open up the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local (I think that's where it is, my memory of Red Hat is fading fast) and add it to the end.

thanks for the input by i've already tried % hdparm -X66 -d1 /dev/hde and it completely disabled my HD. my home directory showed up empty and i couldn't bring up anything that wasn't already in RAM. so, i think i'll have to scratch that idea. i didn't get the feeling that it was very healthy for my HD to give it that command...

by the way, I'm using an IBM/Hitachi Deskstar ATA100 120GB hard drive with a serial to ATA convertor.

i may just have to get rid of the converter and go back to IDE but i get better performance under WinXP with the converter. thats why i was using it...

[devhen 0]

oh, and, can anybody tell me how i might go about figuring out exactly what kind of HD drive performance i'm getting (MB/sec)? i've seen people reporting how many Megs/sec they're getting. how do they find this? thanks.

[Admiral LSD 0]

Yeah, hdparm can be like that but you need to enable DMA on your driver before you'll get any decent performance out of it. From memory though, I do believe there are patches to the kernel siimage driver which automatically set the DMA modes (like the one that solved the exact same problem with the nForce2 onboard PATA channels) but they may only be for 2.5/2.6. You're bound to find more information on that by Googling though so that's what I'd suggest you do.

 

It's not a definitve benchmark by any stretch of imagination but you can get a reasonable estimate of your HDD transfer speed by again using the hdparm command:

 

Code:

hdparm -Tt /dev/hd*

 

In your case it'd be:

 

Code:

hdparm -Tt /dev/hde

 

This'll give you 2 figures: buffered reads and unbuffered reads. It's the latter you're most interested in, the former will always give some kind of ridiculous number.

[devhen 0]

i tried this and the second number i got was:

 

64 MB in 48.56 seconds = 1.32 MB/sec

 

pretty impressive, eh?....

 

i'm going to try a couple more kernels (maybe see if 2.6pre will work) and then i'll just have to get rid of the converter and go back to IDE. however, i'll have to reinstall RH at that point, i'm sure, although i think windows will be OK.

[Admiral LSD 0]

Unless you want to keep experimenting with hdparm (which can be made to work, at least according to some of the SATA users over at nForcersHQ), 2.6 is probably your best bet. Just be prepared for a fair bit of other stuff (such as lm_sensors although I think that's being made redundant by 2.6) to not compile right under it yet. If you want to stick with a stable 2.4 kernel, do a search here (It's an nForce forum but as a lot of nForce boards also include SiI3112 SATA chips, it's as good a place to find info as any) for stuff to try to get DMA enabled on you board.

[Admiral LSD 0]

Unless you want to keep experimenting with hdparm (which can be made to work, at least according to some of the SATA users over at nForcersHQ), 2.6 is probably your best bet. Just be prepared for a fair bit of other stuff (such as lm_sensors although I think that's being made redundant by 2.6) to not compile right under it yet. If you want to stick with a stable 2.4 kernel, do a search here (It's an nForce forum but as a lot of nForce boards also include SiI3112 SATA chips, it's as good a place to find info as any) for stuff to try to get DMA enabled on you board.

[devhen 0]

hey, thanks for the help. I'm am using an nForce2 board, in fact. the Abit NF7-S. its an awesome board...

 

but I've already given up and pulled out my Serial to IDE converter. I might be sacrificing a bit of potential performance but i don't mind at this point. at least now I can have my SATA controller disabled which speeds up my boot time quite a bit because before the BIOS and the kernel had to both query the SATA controller for drives which takes several seconds for each of the 2 channels...

[devhen 0]

Good news. The Linux kernel performance issue with SiI 3112 SATA controllers is going to be fixed! Here is a message from the kernel maling list by Andre Hedrick who is working with Silicon Image to get the fix prepared and put into the kernel:

 

Quote:

I have a scheduled fix prepared for release and review by SiI monday

morning (October 6th) 9AM Pacific time. Once it is cleared by SiI, it will be released

out to the masses.

 

I can only chortle over the issue of how attempts to replace me, and me

trying to escape the indenture servant slave of maintainership yet still

bound after nearly 6 years.

 

Will attempt to address the mod15b phy issues

 

Cheers,

 

Andre Hedrick

LAD Storage Consulting Group