Re: satalink(4) on sparc64

Hello,

On Mon, 2 Apr 2018 10:43:50 +0100
Sad Clouds <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello, it's getting difficult to get hold of old SCSI disks, so I installed a cheap SATA PCI card
> into Sun Ultra 10. It is using satalink driver, but I/O speed is lower than what I expected.
> I get about 30 MBytes/sec writing and reading. I also tried writing to a /dev/rwd1b partition
> to bypass file system, but got around 32 MBytes/sec. The old SCSI disk could manage
> around 30-40 MBytes/sec.
> 
> I've heard that some PC cards perform internal initialization during BIOS boot and enable
> various performance features, etc. This doesn't happen on sparc64, since there is no 
> x86 BIOS. Does anyone know if the same applies to cards with satalink driver? Wikipedia
> says bandwidth for 32-bit PCI bus is around 133 MB/s. Not sure if the issue is with the
> driver or the actual hardware.

This is odd, I have a card with a similar chip in a v120 and got about
100MB/s out of it. The disk hooked to it has trouble though, so I can't
rest right away.

satalink0 at pci2 dev 5 function 0: Silicon Image SATALink 3512 (rev. 0x01)
satalink0: SATALink BA5 register space disabled
satalink0: bus-master DMA support present
satalink0: primary channel wired to native-PCI mode
satalink0: using ivec 15 for native-PCI interrupt
atabus2 at satalink0 channel 0
satalink0: secondary channel wired to native-PCI mode
atabus3 at satalink0 channel 1
satalink0: port 0: device present, speed: 1.5Gb/s
wd0(satalink0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) (using DMA)

That said, when measuring, did you use the raw device? as in, dd if=/dev/rwd1c ?

have fun
Michael