dma errors with sata_sil and Seagate disk

[John Lash]

I'm using the sata_sil driver on a Tyan 2885. It has onboard Silicon Image 3114
SATA interfaces. There's one disk connected now, a Seagate ST380013AS. I've been
seeing persistent problems with errors (DriveStatusError) on the device. It
seems to happen pretty quickly under a load (trying to copy a couple of GB of
files to the disk).

I noticed that the sil_blacklist had quite a few Seagate entries and on
searching the web, found that these were dma problems that looked pretty similar
to mine. Since then I've added this model number to the sil_blacklist table,
rebuilt and rebooted. Now it's stable (just copied 20 GB of data to it). Is this
another problematic drive? Or am I masking the original problem?

I see the problem consistently on 2.6.8.1, 2.6.9, and 2.6.10-rc2-bk13. Also saw
the problems when I tried this on an older AMD MP system with a SI 3112 PCI
controller card.

I don't see any indication that Seagate has released any public firmware
upgrades for this drive. Anybody have a suggestion?

--john
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