Vladimir Lazarenko wrote:

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My hardware is SMP Supermicro with 6 disks on
Marvell MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 03)
and the sata_mv.c is version 0.25 dated 22 Oct 2005

The thing works with "old" mvsata340 driver, but the "new" kernel
with
your driver freezes when it starts to probe disks.  Even Magic SysRq
does not work.  The last lines I see on screen are like this:

sata_mv version 0.25
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:03.0[A] -> GSI 56 (level, low) -> IRQ 185
sata_mv(0000:02:03.0) 32 slots 8 ports unknown mode IRQ via MSI
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x0 ctl 0xF8C22120 bmdma 0x0 irq 185
ata2: .... <same things>            0xF8C24120 ...
...
ata8: .... <same thing>             0xF8C38120 ...
ATA: abnormal status 0x80 on port 0xF8C2211C
... <five more lines identical to the above>
ata1: dev 0 ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 781422768 sectors: LBA48

- and at this point it freezes hard.
Any suggestions for me?  Any information I can collect to help
troubleshooting?

[...]

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In the meantime, try turning off SMP and seeing if that makes a
difference.  There still might be a problem with the spinlocks and
if so
it should go away in uniprocessor mode.

'nosmp' makes no difference.

Booting with nosmp isn't enough, you need to compile the kernel with
CONFIG_SMP turned off. Otherwise the spinlocks will still be used and
could cause a hard hang.

Yeah, that was it!  It boots with the kernel compiled for UP.
(did not yet have a chance to check how it works).
Any chance that somebody competent would fix the driver for SMP?

Umm, that sounds freakingly familiar to what I just had with sata_nv...
Try "noapic" in smp mode, will that help?

Yesterday, I tried it and it did not help.

And just in case, did you try 2.6.14-rc5? That was the kernel that fixed
my similar problem "out-of-the-box".

I pulled up todays's git version (yesterdays's claimed to be 'rc5' as
well), and all of a sudden it booted in SMP mode, without any magic from
my side.  So, the freeze problem is apparently fixed now.

Now I ran into next problem.  I have the controller with 8 channels, and
first 6 of them have disks connected.  Disks are identical, and
mvsata340 driver recognizes them all.  But sata_mv attaches first two
disks, then fails to recognize the next two, then successfully attaches
the last two.  So I end up with 4 disks online, out of 6.  I am
attaching relevant excerpts from dmesg, and similar portion from syslog
of 2.6.11.12 kernel with mvsata340 driver.  (The latter does attach all
six disks).

Any suggestions?
Eugene