Hi,
I had problems getting my Promise SX4000 controller to run with libata.
First, I noticed libata refused to drive it (no associated PCI id). After
patching that (including the handler for the right chipset), a
"modprobe sata_promise" hung for about 15 minutes while initializing the
ECC RAM. It then recognized the one attached harddisk, but disk access was
not really possible (I gave up after waiting for half an hour or so).
Let me apologize for testing an older version of libata. At the time I had
the problems, it was the newest available version. I enabled debugging and
post the logs here in the hope that they might help supporting this
controller in the future.
A note about the controller itself: It has 4 Parallel ATA ports and no
Serial ATA ports. The controller sports the usual SoftRAID from Promise
(0,1,0+1 and 5). The RAID5 seems to be a new feature. I do not care about
the RAID (well, I do, I'm writing a dm configuration helper for it right
now), but I would like to access the drive.