Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 118095
(IDE SIL) Bad SATA Sil 3112 performance
Last modified: 2013-07-02 22:18:40 EDT
I have Kouwell 2-port SATA Sil 3112 PCI card. This gives bad performance on x86 and x86_64 kernel (latest 2.4.21-9.0.1 on some PC and on dual Opteron) even I used hdparm to burst data transfers: $ hdparm -d1 -u1 -c1 -X66 -k1 /dev/hde $ hdparm -tT /dev/hde /dev/hde: Timing buffer-cache reads: 700 MB in 2.00 seconds = 350.00 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 78 MB in 3.04 seconds = 25.66 MB/sec This is about half of expected performance even RH's Knowledgebase claim support for ICH5 and Sil3112 chipsets. I was unable to go over UltraDMA2 (it says "not supported"). I saw suggestion to apply latest SATA patches from Jeff Garzik on LKML (http://lwn.net/Articles/73094/) to get full performance but I was unable to identify what he means when going through LKML archive...
You should be using the sata_sil driver not siimage. This should be fixed in RHEL3 U3, with an upcoming update.
There is no sata_sil module in the 2.4.21-15.0.4.EL kernel. The other bad news is that SATA is recognized as hd[ab] during kernel boot along with other IDE interfaces so there is IMHO no possibility to load separate sata_sil module. It seems that I have to wait for U3 few more days :-#
The silraid module is in kernel-unsupported - perhaps that is what you are after?
This is a different module. Module sata_sil is in 2.4.21-20.EL from U3 update.
I have no clue how to init SATA disc with sata_sil module instead of siimage (siimage is builded into the kernel). Is there a way how to avoid inicialization of ide[12] (I have IDE discs too) without recompiling the kernel without siimage?
Is there a reason to have siimage compiled into the kernel even there is sata_sil in place? Old legacy IDE module for SATA could be dropped IMHO.
I would love to :) Unfortunately, dropping siimage means breaking existing setups...
I will try to use ide=reverse. But what about U4 & drop siimage for SATA?
Well, ide=reverse works. But even I used ide2=noprobe ide3=noprobe hde=noprobe hdf=noprobe hdg=noprobe hdh=noprobe, siimage takes Sil3112 chipset for itself during kernel boot (before initrd) so I'm unable to load sata_sil module then. I tryed to use onboard VIA SATA VT6420 & sata_via but it hangs or does not detect connected disc so I'm completly lost with original RHEL3 2.4.21-20.ELsmp for AMD64 (dual Opteron 242 on MSI mainboard). I have an academic licence so this is the last defense line for me :-( and I'm going to recompile the kernel with no siimage. Or do you have another idea? Thank you...
I ran into the same problem here after buying two new boxes, now I'm into great trouble because I have not much time to set them up. Why not adding a kernel switch to the siimage.c to disable use by specifying a special option on kernel boot like siimage_skip=y (or siimage_load=n).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 119478 ***
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.