Solved SiI 3114 Driver FreeBSD 10-STABLE

dcbdbis

dcbdbis

Good Evening Community,

I needed to add a couple of SATA ports to my system. I purchased a Vantec UGT-ST210R PCI card (not PciE).

It is based upon the SiI 3114 chipset. I enabled the siis driver in my kernel and recompiled. The kernel config does not specifically mention this chipset, only it's next of "kin".

This add-in card works just fine under Windows (my gaming drive), and under Linux (Live-USB), but I cannot get it working under FreeBSD 10-STABLE. The only thing attached to this card is my DVD-RW and my BluRay reader.

I'll replace the card if I need to, but before I spend money, I though it would be wise to ask the community to make sure I've haven't missed anything obvious (like any driver hints that need to be passed for this card to work normally, that I am unaware of).

Thank you for any assistance and/or pointers. And if this card simply isn't supported - no big deal. I'll just replace it on payday with a chipset that is in my kernel config NOTES.


Sincerely and respectfully,

Dave
 
There are some threads here about the Sil3114. It used to work, but might not work with current versions of FreeBSD. I have used the Sil3124 and Sil3132 controllers, and they are okay. Motherboard controllers are generally better.
 
I did try several of the kernel options, across several kernel builds, and none worked. On older versions of FreeBSD, according to threads I've read, they worked - albeit unreliably. This card is not held in high esteem.

I'm going to replace the card with a chipset listed in the kernel config/NOTES. I should have checked first, and I didn't. I ASSumed. :-)


Thanks for the reply wblock!


Sincerely and respectfully,

Dave
 
Don't expect performance to be anywhere near decent and due to the awesome (horrible) design of that chipset and workarounds even lower the performance further to keep it working at all. If you need to expand SATA ports ASMedia ASM1061 or ASM1062 based cards are highly recommended as they follow AHCI specs which pretty much no other low-end controller chipset does (Marvell, Silicon Image), I think ODD works fine too but I haven't tested. These work fine in FreeBSD without any hassle. Pretty sure you need the old ATA driver for the Sil311X controllers.
 
The man page for siis(4) only mentions PCIe and PCI-X controllers. What does # pciconf -lv report for your siis card?
FWIW, I set up a SiI 3531 card once, it was very easy, just adding siis_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf and the card was detected. But this was on FreeBSD 8.2-stable:
Code: 
root@kg-f2# uname -a
FreeBSD kg-f2.kg4.no 8.2-STABLE FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE #5: Fri Jun  3 17:20:39 CEST 2011  root@kg-f2.kg4.no:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
the card is detected as
Code: 
root@kg-f2# pciconf -lv | grep -A 3 siis
siis0@pci0:2:0:0:   class=0x018000 card=0x35311095 chip=0x35311095 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
  vendor  = 'Silicon Image Inc (Was: CMD Technology Inc)'
  device  = 'SiI 3531 SATA Controller'
  class  = mass storage
the machine is still running fine (I use it as a local fileserver).
 
Hello tingo!

Thank you for the post.

I did indeed try to manually add the kernel module, in addition to building custom kernels. I'm on the maillists, and the driver for this card is not supported in 10 and later. FreeBSD supports SiI in some of it's iterations, just not this particular card, the 3114. This card uses a different chipset, and as dizzy mentions, it's not SATA specification compliant.

I've also been in contact with their tech support and upgraded the BIOS in the card to the latest rev. The real issue is that the underlying hardware is not SATA specification compliant. The card's BIOS and the drivers for this card are simply a ruse to make it work without being SATA compliant.

The only solution is to replace the card with a better card, which I am doing Wednesday, with the ASM1061 as suggested by dizzy.

As you have noted, better SiI based cards still have functioning drivers in 10.

Again, I appreciate the tip and the post, I simply bought the card before doing my due-diligence.


Sincerely and respectfully,

Dave
 
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