Stuart Herbert

The external Maxtor drive I backup my photo library to is dying. Fortunately, it’s only a backup, but still - it’s reminded me that I really need to get my fileserver up and running.

Since I last looked at this project, the Marvell SATA chipset driver has been included in the kernel. This is a really good thing - I didn’t want to rely on my own attempts to port the driver to later Linux kernels.

Unfortunately, I’ve had no luck getting the driver to work.

The driver included in gentoo-sources-2.6.16-r7 locks the box up whenever I try to access any of the disks connected via the Marvell chipset. There’s no kernel panic - interrupts seem disabled, and the only recourse seems to be hitting the power switch.

According to kernel.org, there’s been a few bug fixes added to the sata_mv driver since 2.6.16 was released. I’ve tried 2.6.17-rc5-git4, but I honestly couldn’t tell you whether these fixes work or not. Unfortunately, this kernel can’t initialise the VIA SATA chipset that the root filing system disks are connected to, so I can’t get far enough to find out whether or not the Marvell chipset now works.

I wonder if Marvell themselves have released an updated version of their driver, or whether the in-kernel driver superceeds it?