Re: [9fans] Any one going to change to sata disks?

[geoff@collyer.net]

To summarise, sdmv50xx.c in the cpu/terminal kernels will drive the
Marvell 50[48]1 controllers, but should work with any of the
[56]0[48][01] controllers, I believe, with just minor tweaks to
mv50pnp().  I have a working sdmv50xx.c for the file server kernel, at
least it works with the 4 Hitachi SATA disks Coraid provided for
testing, and with the Marvell 88SX5041 (4 SATA-I ports with flash)
controller.  I've added a "statm" file server command, analogous to
statd and stati, so it's possible to get some measurements.  It seems
quite fast, but perhaps I'm easily impressed.  Coraid have made some
changes to their original devsata0.c driver since Russ turned it into
sdmv50xx.c for the cpu kernels, and these help cope with odd disks and
may give some performance improvement.  I'm still trying to merge
these changes into the file server kernel's sdmv50xx.c.

As an aside, sdata.c in the file server kernel may be a little faster
now because I removed some excessively cautious locking from it that I
originally added out of paranoia.