Most recent kernel where this bug did not occur: Distribution: Ubuntu Linux Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS sparc64 / Gentoo Linux Hardware Environment: Sun Blade 100 Software Environment: Problem Description: The ALI15X3 IDE controller cannot access drives in DMA mode with presend driver drivers/ide/pci/alim15x3.c , as a result performance on the affected sparc64 systems is very minimal. At least on my Sun Blade 100, and i have seen reports other places on the internet, that without passing the argument ide=nodma to the kernel... this box can't even boot due to this bug. This was supposed to be fixed back in 2003? Apparently the below link (see below) has a proposed solution for 2.4 kernel tree, but was this fix ever applied to 2.6? http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0307.2/0620.html Steps to reproduce: Install any major linux distribution on a Sun Blade 100 (or any sparc64) system with the ALI15x3 IDE controller.
The machine is VERY, VERY slow with only PIO mode access...
Let me clarify, when accessing a drive using the ali15x3 driver in sparc64, severe data corruption occurs to the point that a system cannot boot under dma. It appears it CAN access the drive, but if you actually try to do anything it pukes because it keeps corrupting the data.
The ALi documentation I posess does not deal with its interface to Sparc systems only ALi chipsets.
Seems to be working fine in freebsd, i dunno if that's any help though because i'm not a developer.
Bartlomiej is now back so I'm transferring this bug to the ide maintainer. If the new pata_ali driver also shows the same problems please let me know however.
According to follow-up email http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0307.2/0812.html the fix (in this or other form) was ACK-ed by Alan and applied to 2.5 but I don't know whether this is indeed happened. Does booting with "ide0=autotune ide1=autotune" (this is example valid for ide0/1 only) kernel parameters help?
I will install gentoo this week on the sun blade 100 with the autotune argument and follow up with this bug.
i changed a drive and the problem seems to have corrected itself it was a maxtor drive, perhaps corrupting the ide channel? anyways... what was really weird is that freebsd worked with it just fine but when it was plugged into linux it puked anyways... that drive will plague me no more. So either 1 or another thing happened.... either the drive was cooked and by replacing it i solved the problem... OR... the version of ubuntu linux i installed does not have this issue. Linux ubuntu 2.6.15-27-sparc64 #1 Fri Dec 8 17:53:06 UTC 2006 sparc64 GNU/Linux
OK, thanks for reporting.