sata pci cards in ultra 60 or blade 1000 (Update)

[Marius Strobl]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 07:30:53PM -0500, R J wrote:
> Marius,
> 
> I would like to say that thanks for fixing the ata-marvell driver for the 
> SuperMicro Sata card on sparc64, atleast the blade 1000.  Your patch has 
> enabled the card to detect the disk drive and complete booting.  Not only 
> that, I was able to go all the way and create a new partition on the disk, 
> newfs it, and mount it.  I was able to copy 1.6gigs of data onto the 
> partition, and was able to copy data from the partition to another 
> directory within the same partition at a tune of about 40MB/s.
> 
> Before that patch, the system was not able to complete booting.
> 
> Out of curiosity, ofcourse, what does the patch do?  Does it basically 
> disable 64-bit and dma for the driver on sparc64?

It does no such things, it just fixes some sloppy programming
(see my last email for a description of the problems) which
caused the driver to only have a chance of working on x86 but
AFAICT not on any of the other architectures supported by
FreeBSD.

> This is a PCI-X 133mhz 
> card.  It would be a dream to get half the band-width as it is in a 66mhz 
> pci slot.
> 
> Thanks,  Robert.
> 
> NOTE:
> 
> Here's a brief output from stock iostat: note the numbers for ad0.
> 

I admit that I have no experience with "benchmarking" disk
I/O with iostat(8), however checking with my machines
suggests that 40MB/s actually is an excellent result for
copying data from a disk to itself, I don't get anywhere
near that rate, not even on x86 with SATA300 gear.

Marius