Promise SATAII150 TX2plus ok for 6.0?

[Jud]

Nikolas Britton wrote:
> On 2/1/06, Ville Lundberg <freebsd at juiceless.net> wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> being quite fed up with the crappy Sil3512 SATA-controller on my
>> mainboard (write_dma timeouts, and just when I thought 6.0-release fixed
>> it, "setfeatures set transfer mode semaphore timeout"-messages is
>> filling my screens), I'm looking after good replacements. Browsing the
>> web and the mailing list archives, Promise cards have been praised. I
>> could get my hands on a SATAII150 TX2plus, anyone having good/bad
>> experiences with such a card?
>>
>>     
>
> After I patched my FreeBSD 5.4 server with the ata-mkIII patches my
> FastTrak TX2300 worked fine. Those patches are in FreeBSD 6 now. I'm
> not sure if the RAID rebuild stuff is working yet in FreeBSD 6, I have
> not updated that system yet, but you can always rebuild the array from
> the BIOS.
>
> The Bad:
> This card does not play nice with other RAID controllers, esp. cards
> from other companies. This card would hang my server at POST if I had
> my HighPoint SATA-II RAID 5 card installed. Dealing with Promise's
> tech support dude was bad, very bad. On the other hand when I spoke
> with one of HighPoint's tech's (5pm on a Friday) he was both friendly
> and competent, about 5 minutes in we had the problem with the Promise
> card solved.
>   
I've experienced the "setfeatures..." problem with the TX2300, with 2 
different FreeBSD versions: latest -CURRENT (after installing an updated 
kernel, when beginning installworld, "setfeatures..." messages repeat 
until a hard reboot), and an up-to-date -CURRENT userland with kernel 
from December 8th 2005.  (That setup worked until I got a system hang 
trying to run glxgears with an ATI R300 card.  Afterward, when bootup 
got to the point of fs checking, "setfeatures..." ad infinitum again.)  
So far, -CURRENT userland and kernel from December 8th are working OK, 
but I haven't done anything to unduly stress the system.

Jud