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General notes on SATA support in Solaris x86 This document explains the current state of SATA support and the issues/workarounds for SATA support in Solaris x86. Currently, the following chips have the SATA support in Solaris 10 x86:

• ICH
  
• ICH5, ICH5R
• ICH6, ICH6R
• SiliconImage
  
• 3114
• 3112
• 3512
• nVIDIA
  
• nForce4

All these controllers are supported in PATA (Parallel ATA) compatibility mode. It means that the AHCI mode available in ICH6/ICH6R is not supported. One needs to choose the proper SATA mode in the BIOS settings.
 
The RAID support in ICH5R/ICH6R & SiliconImage chips is truly a plain software RAID. These chips support the RAID only to the extent of BIOS being aware of booting from a RAID set; the actual  RAID itself is handled by a software driver. In Solaris, the existing ata driver is a non-RAID driver and such will not bind to any device which is set in RAID mode. One needs to explicitly disable the RAID in the BIOS. If you really want to do RAID on these controllers, you can use SVM (Solaris Volume Manager).

Tyan S2885 machines with older BIOSes (version 2.02 and lower) have flaky SATA settings. The SiI3114 on these boards gets stuck to RAID mode even after you deselect the RAID mode in the BIOS. Sometimes it even randomly changes the mode on a reboot. You need to obtain the latest BIOS from Tyan support site  to fix the issue. Install the latest BIOS and deselect the RAID mode and everything will be fine.

There are some boards with SiliconImage chipsets which get hard coded to RAID mode and do not have an option to change to non-RAID mode. So these chips do not bind to the ata driver. Contact the mobo vendor to see if they have an updated BIOS that fixes this issue. Some vendors may not fix this issue, in that case, there is currently no workaround.


Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris Technorati Tag: Solaris ( Jun 14 2005, 08:41:35 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [4]