Re: ata_piix failure on ich6m

[Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We've got an ich6m system (a Toshiba Portege S100). ata_piix attempts to 
> drive the chipset, but fails - however, it doesn't bail out. As a result 
> it remains bound to the device and ahci isn't loaded.
>
> I've attached the lspci output for the chipset. A few things to note 
> are:
>
> 1) The AHCI BAR is set
> 2) The SCC register identifies it as an AHCI controller
> 3) Bits 2 and 0 of the PCS are set, which the spec claims indicates that 
> the port is to be controlled as an ahci device.
>
> So, my question is effectively: why does ata_piix attempt to disable 
> ahci rather than simply letting the ahci driver bind? Points (1) and (2) 
> seem to be checked by the code, but I'm guessing that in the case of (3) 
> it should just return ENODEV and let ahci be run instead. If so, should 
> I code up a patch?

I'm not very sure but it might be historical.  ahci got implemented 
after ata_piix and in the meantime ata_piix must have handled all it 
could.  Can you verify whether modifying the code to return -ENODEV work 
for your machine?  If so, that could be the correct solution but I'm a 
bit worried because it could change probing order or fail to enable 
devices it used to.  Maybe we need a hack to return -ENODEV iff ahci is 
there to handle the device.

--
tejun
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