using ahci driver on a PE830

[Marc Bejarano]

At 18:26 4/10/2006, Marc Bejarano wrote:
 >i've got a couple PowerEdge 830's that
 >i've been tinkering with.  i ran into the same thing that Brendan Conoboy
 >ran into with his PE800 last july:
 >http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2005-July/021903.html
 >
 >he was using the ata_piix driver with the onboard SATA controller and
 >getting crappy performance.  he managed to get the ahci driver working

<snip>

 >in any case, as of rev A02, the PE830 BIOS only has two options for the
 >onboard ICH7R controller: "ATA Mode" and "Off".  i'm only able to use the
 >ata_piix driver with "ATA Mode".  so i'm hoping that there is somebody from
 >Dell on this list that can either tell me what i'm doing wrong or get
 >somebody from Dell to respin an uncrippled BIOS.

after MUCH effort i've basically hit a brick wall with this.  dell admits 
that their BIOS has crippled the hardware and say this is a conscious 
decision that was made which is out of the hands of the linux 
engineers.  redhat just says their certification tests don't cover AHCI 
support.  i find that pathetic considering it was a redhat employee that 
worked so hard to bring us a good AHCI driver.

the lesson to take home is that you shouldn't buy dell servers without 
making certain before-hand that they don't have a crippled BIOS.  redhat 
certification is meaningless in this regard.

FYI, the HP ProLiant ML310 G3 is the equivalent competitor's product and is 
NOT similarly crippled.

if anybody out there has any sway with dell and can get this wrong righted, 
i'd love to hear from you.

cheers,
marc