SATA hot plug support on MSI E350IA-E44 (ATI IXP700)

J

jnitis

Hello,

I'm having a rather intricate issue with regards to the hotplug/swap of drives (Seagate NAS) with the motherboard mentioned in the topic subject (MSI E350IA-E44 which is using the integrated ATI IXP700 AHCI SATA controller) on FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE-p4 (FreeNAS).

Essentially it doesn't work 100% correctly (although support for it is claimed by the motherboard and drives) and leaves the OS in an inconsistent state with regards to what the various disk subsystem commands return (geom, glabel, gpart, camcontrol, etc.). I'm hoping that someone with intricate knowledge of FreeBSD's disk subsystem and/or the developer of FreeBSD's ATI IXP700 AHCI SATA controller can assist.

This URL http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/sata-hot-plug-support-on-msi-e350ia-e44.20445/ on the FreeNAS forums describes the issue in great detail. I will copy and paste the main issue as it relates to FreeBSD here:

Now on to the issue at hand. I opened a case with MSI to which they quickly replied and they provided me with an internal BIOS release that appears to have resolved the issue of other HDs going offline when one is removed. So that's fixed, yay. (Why they don't post this publicly I don't know, I will strongly encourage them to.) That being said I believe some issues still remain. Whether they are HW or SW related (or both) is unknown. They are as follows.

Issue #1: removal of the drive is detected by the AHCI driver properly and reported in dmesg however insertion of a new drive is not automatically recognized by the driver nor does it get reported in dmesg. That being said what's very interesting is that it's recognized by every other disk related tool I know of in FreeBSD including camcontrol devlist, geom/glabel/gpart (which appear to be the same executable at least in FreeNAS, don't know if they're using a busybox sort of thing that comes with mini-FreeBSD or what), and smartctl.

Issue #2: if the same fresh drive is then removed and re-inserted I receive the same error I did before. Note that this error repeats if the process is repeated. At this point in time the disk commands get into a funky state and basically break.

Code: 
cam_periph_alloc: attempt to re-allocate valid device ada0 rejected flags 0x118 refcount 2
adaasync: Unable to attach to new device due to status 0x6
Click to expand...

A very interesting note is the following:

However in the geom output some data is from the new disk and some from the old (note the description displayed is from the *removed* disk whereas ident is from the *new* disk)
Click to expand...

Would greatly appreciate any help on this item. I'm willing to keep my ticket open with MSI on this in case I need to further interact with them to obtain a root cause analysis. Thanks.
 
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