SATA under RHEL4 on a Precision 370?

[Lawrence Houston]

John:

On Mon, 5 Feb 2007, John_Hull at Dell.com wrote:
>
> 2) There are 2 device drivers for Intel SATA controllers: ata_piix and
> ahci. Ata_piix is for "native IDE" mode, and treats the SATA disks as
> legacy IDE drives. The AHCI module should provide better overall
> performance and the higher transfer speeds you expect.
>
> On the later Precision workstations (380 and 39), switching between SATA
> modes in the BIOS caused the SATA controllers to change PCI ID's, which
> would tell the OS to load the correct driver. However, on the 370, both
> modes have the same PCI ID, so you'll have to switch the driver
> manually. Edit your /etc/modprobe.conf file and replace all references
> to "ata_piix" with "ahci", remake your initrd(s), and then reboot. You
> should then be using the ahci driver.

After changing MODPROBE.CONF's Alias for "scsi_hostadapter" from 
"ata_piix" to "ahci" and remaking the initrd this is what I get:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCSI subsystem initialized
libata version 1.20 loaded.
ahci 0000:00:1f.2: version 1.2
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1f.2[C] -> GSI 20 (level, low) -> IRQ 217
MSI INIT SUCCESS
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64
ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0000 32 slots 4 ports 1.5 Gbps 0xf impl SATA 
mode
ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq pm led slum part
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF881CD00 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 217
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF881CD80 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 217
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF881CE00 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 217
ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF881CE80 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 217
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113)
ata1: dev 0 cfg 49:2f00 82:746b 83:7f61 84:4023 85:7469 86:3e41 87:4023 88:207f
ata1: dev 0 ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 312500000 sectors: LBA48
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/133
scsi0 : ahci
ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
scsi1 : ahci
ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
scsi2 : ahci
ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0)
scsi3 : ahci
   Vendor: ATA       Model: WDC WD1600JS-75N  Rev: 10.0
   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
SCSI device sda: 312500000 512-byte hdwr sectors (160000 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
SCSI device sda: 312500000 512-byte hdwr sectors (160000 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
  sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 < sda5 sda6 >
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is a SStatus of 113 on SATA link up 1.5 Gbps and the 160 GIG WD 
Drive appears to still be running at UDMA/133...  Am I miss reading the 
Kernel Messages, is the Precision 370 still running in the Native ATA 
Mode???  Thanks for any further insite you can afford...

Lawrence Houston  --  (dell at greenfield.dyndns.org)