Promise TX2 in 2.6.7 - 2.6.9 broken?

[Aiwa]

Hello. I recently ran out of SATA ports on my ASUS K8V Deluxe mainboard, so I purchased a Promise 150 TX2plus controller featuring 2 SATA and 1 PATA port.

My system runs fine on a tailor-made, monolithic kernel. I can mount all the hard disks and perform read/write operations. However, after a few gigabytes activity (non-deterministic) on the hard-disks attached to the TX2 controller, the kernel does a hard lock up. No reaction to keyboard input, pings, whatsoever. I tried different partitionings and file systems, without any effect. Kernels 2.6.7-r14 to 2.6.9-r14 show identical behavior.

I can't try the new 2.6.11-r3 kernel because its Olympic Token-Ring drivers are broken and boot hangs at "Starting local...". If someone can confirm that the TX2 drivers were fixed from 2.6.9-r14 to 2.6.11-r3 I will try to get it working, otherwise I see little reason to use that bugged version.

I read in old forum posts somewhere, that the TX2 driver used to be broken on AMD64. If this is still the case, what controller should I buy instead? I know the highpoints work well, but they start at 150 bucks and I don't really need RAID

thx,
Aiwa

[lhach]

My controller is a Promise FastTrak 378 TX2 integrated into my K8T Neo FIS2R motherboard.
With 2.6.10-r7 (and -r6) I've used all ports on the card, both SATA and PATA, without any problems.

G'luck!

[Aiwa]

I managed to solve the problem myself by updating the Motherboard and Promise Controller BIOS to the latest version. That's probably the first time a BIOS update ever fixed one of my computers .

The system works fine now with kernel 2.6.9 and 6 encrypted SATA disks.

thx,
Aiwa