DMA timeouts

[a.zapatista]

I'm using 2.6 test 11 gentoo with the sata lib_ata and promise sata drivers compiled in. My sata controller is inbuilt on my asus sk8n motherboard its the same as a tx2 i think. I've got 2 sata drives set up in a software raid 0 array but any prolonged disk reads or writes cause dma timeouts and from then on the disks are inaccesible till i restart my computer. I have also tried using 2.4 and two different promise drivers but with no success.

What is a dma timeout and what could be causing it?
Is it a bug in the kernel raid stuff or the promise driver?
has anyone else had similar problems?

thanks in advance

[Mad Alex]

I have a similar problem with the Asus SK8N motherboard which uses the Promise SATA 150 TX2+ RAID chip (well, fake raid!) using the AMD64 live CD (2.6.9 kernel).

I have two Maxtor 120GB SATA drives attached and can read and write to both individually with no issues. However when both drives are used at the same time I get "dma timeout" or "command timeout" errors and can't use the drives again without rebooting.

This is something of a problem as I put in two identical drives to run them as a RAID 0 array using the linux software raid so they will always be used simultaneously.

This appears to be a known issue with the sata_promise driver and has nothing to do with the kernel raid subsystem; I get the same issue running to copies of dd simultaneously reading off the two disks.

I have found that disabling APIC (eg. adding noapic to the kernel parameters) made things sufficiently stable that I could continue with the install.