Adaptec 1210SA (Silicon Image S3112 SATA)

[Bruce M Simpson]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 10:46:58AM -0000, Richard Parry wrote:
[..]
> RAID 1). The chipset on the card is a Silicon Image, and I am 90% sure its
> the S3112 chipset (there is a sticker over the chipset I dont want to
> remove, but the pics of the card on the net show the S3112 chipset). I have
> downloaded and I am going to install FreeBSD v5.2.1, does anyone know if
> this controller/chipset is compatible with FreeBSD ? I have looked on the
> hardware compatibility listing and there are many SATA chipset's, including
> other Silicon Image chipset's, but unfortunately not the model I have.

SiI3112 is listed in the manual page for ata(4) on -CURRENT. However...

cvs log /sys/dev/ata/ata-chipset.c
%%%
----------------------------
revision 1.50
date: 2003/12/08 09:22:20;  author: sos;  state: Exp;  lines: +3 -1
More errata fixing for the SiI3112A disaster chip:

Serialize access to the SATA channels, the chip messes up if
both channels are used at the same time.

The SiI3112 hereby takes the price as the most crappy SATA chip in
existance by a significant amount.

My advise to our userbase is to avoid this chip like the plague...
----------------------------
%%%

> Also, the card comes with a web management application, which says its
> compatbile only with Windows and RedHat Linux, if the chipset is supported
> by FreeBSD, would it be possible to port over this application for use on
> BSD ?

Depends on the ioctls and device nodes it uses. For a long time I used the
Linux version of afacli to manage Dell PERC RAID controllers because the
driver had the appropriate ioctl shim; Scott Long managed to liberate a
FreeBSD binary version at Adaptec. Be prepared to do some reverse
engineering to find out what your management application uses.

> If the chipset is not compatible, would this cause an issue ? (e.g. write
> errors, corrupt data, partition problems etc) ?

You probably don't want to use this chip if it's given Soren that much grief.

BMS