marvell sata controller

[Scott Long]

Ken Gunderson wrote:
> Howdy All:
> 
> I've got a distributor who's out of stock on a board I want and
> suggesting an alternate that's very similar.  The alternate board sports
> a "Marvell® SATA Controller chip", however, and from what I've been able
> to discern don't think this is supported under *BSD.  Can anyone
> confirm?
> 

Marvell doesn't typically sell their 805x controller chips for use as
bare SATA controllers.  Usually they are hidden behind a raid engine, or
they are intended for use in software RAID.  As such, Marvell absolutely
does not provide programming specs on these chips, so writing a open
source driver is impossible.

FreeBSD does have support for the Highpoint flavor of Marvell software
RAID, so you might be able to coerce the pci attach code in that driver
to think that your chip is a highpoint product.  The better approach
would probably be to find out how your supplier got ahold of this chip
and what the intended function/purpose of the chip is, then contact the
sub-vendor that is responsbile for that function.

There are also possibilities in reverse engineering, but I'm tainted on
Marvell and cannot comment further.

Scott