Re: I need a hardware wizard... I have been beating my head on thewall..

[David Sims]

Hello people,

  Now I _really_ need to bang my head on the wall... :( .... and thank all
you people who responded to my cry for help... I have to admit that I have
been stupid (or just a little clueless).... but I have worked the puzzle!!

  It seems that sata_vsc works just fine.... My entire problem involved
the PCI IRQ routing mechanism.... and my lack of understanding of the
interaction between 'Loacl APIC', 'IO-APIC' and power management.... It
seems that you can do what you want with 'Local APIC' and 'IO-APIC' but if
you have not enabled ACPI, the APIC stuff is not enabled... and doesn't
seem to do anything....

  I have now enabled both ACPI and APIC (with IO-APIC)  and the IRQ
barking has gone away!! 

  I had a similar problem today with another computer (ASUS
MS4800-MX) where the built in Ethernet on a Via PHY chip (supported by the
SiS900 driver) refused to work... In this case I booted up Knoppix which
worked just fine.... and then started trying to figure out why there was a
difference between knoppix and a vanilla Slackware kernel.... It seems
that Slackware 9.1 does not have ACPI (or APIC or IO-APIC) enabled... Once
I figured that out, it was seemed to make the SIS900 driver work so I
decided to try it on the sata_vsc problem.... The result is history and
everything is working as it should.... It's a shame that the knoppix 3.4
kernel doesn't probe for SATA stuff or I would probably have figured this
out a week ago :(

  Meanwhile, a working sata_vsc allows one to turn a Dell Powervault 745N
(Dell's foray into Network Attached Storage) into a good and cheap unix
server with dual gig NICs and 4 SATA disks that can either be run
independently or via software raid!! Cool!

Thanks again for your support for and patience with me... I will be humble
for a while now... ;)

Dave






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