man pages section 7: Device and Network Interfaces

ata(7D)

Name

ata– AT attachment disk driver

Synopsis

ide@unit-address

Description

The ata driver supports disk and ATAPI CD/DVD devices conforming to the AT Attachment specification including IDE interfaces. Support is provided for both parallel ATA (PATA) and serial ATA (SATA) interfaces.

Refer to the Solaris x86 Hardware Compatibility List for a list of supported controllers.

PRECONFIGURE

A PCI IDE controller can operate in compatibility mode or in PCI-native mode. If more than one controller is present in the system, only one can operate in compatibility mode.

If two PATA drives share the same controller, you must set one to master and the other to slave. If both a PATA disk drive and a PATA CD-ROM drive utilize the same controller, you can designate the disk drive as the master with the CD-ROM drive as the slave, although this is not mandatory.

Supported Settings

Supported settings for the primary controller when in compatibility mode are:

IRQ Level: 14
I/O Address: 0x1F0

Supported settings for the secondary controller when in compatibility mode are:

IRQ Level: 15
I/O Address: 0x170

Note –

When in PCI-native mode, the IRQ and I/O address resources are configured by the system BIOS.

Known Problems and Limitations

This driver does not support any RAID features present on a PATA/SATA controller. As a result, you should configure BIOS to select IDE mode rather than RAID mode. Some systems may require updating BIOS to allow switching modes.
On some systems, the SATA controller must have option ROM enabled or BIOS will not consider SATA drives as bootable devices.
Panasonic LK-MC579B and the Mitsumi FX34005 IDE CD-ROM drives are not supported and cannot be used to install the Solaris operating environment.
CMD-604 is unable to handle simultaneous I/O on both IDE interfaces. This defect causes the Solaris software to hang if both interfaces are used. Use only the primary IDE interface at address 0x1F0.
The Solaris Volume Management software does not work with the Sony CDU-55E CD-ROM drive whether configured as device 0 or 1 (master or slave). Comment out the following line in the /etc/vold.conf file to prevent vold from hanging the controller:
# use cdrom drive /dev/rdsk/c*s2 dev_cdrom.so cdrom%d
NEC CDR-260/CDR-260R/CDR-273 and Sony CDU-55E ATAPI CD-ROM drives might fail during installation.
Sony CDU-701 CD-ROM drives must be upgraded to use firmware version 1.0r or later to support booting from the CD.
The Compact Flash(CF) card can work as an ATA disk through a CF<->ATA adapter. If both card and adapter implement CF Ver2.0, DMA is supported. If either does not, set ata-disk-dma-enabled to '0.'

CONFIGURATION

The ata driver properties are usually set in ata.conf. However, it may be convenient, or in some cases necessary, for you to set some of the DMA related properties as a system global boot environment property. You set or modify properties in the boot environment immediately prior to booting the Solaris kernel using the GRUB boot loader kernel boot command line. You can also set boot environment properties using the eeprom(1M) command or by editing the bootenv.rc configuration file. If a property is set in both the driver's ata.conf file and the boot environment, the ata.conf property takes precedence.

Property modifications other than with the GRUB kernel boot command line are not effective until you reboot the system. Property modifications via the GRUB kernel boot command line do not persist across future boots.

Direct Memory Access is enabled by default for disks and disabled for ATAPI CD/DVD devices. If you are trying to enable DMA when booting from a CD/DVD, you must first set atapi-cd-dma-enabled to '1' using the GRUB kernel boot command line.

ata-dma-enabled

This property is examined before the DMA properties discussed below. If it is set to '0,' DMA is disabled for all ATA/ATAPI devices, and no further property checks are made. If this property is absent or is set to '1,' DMA status is determined by further examining one of the other properties listed below.

ata-disk-dma-enabled

This property is examined only for ATA disk devices, and only if ata-dma-enabled is not set to '0.'

If ata-disk-dma-enabled set to '0,' DMA is disabled for all ATA disks in the system. If this property is absent or set to '1,' DMA is enabled for all ATA disks and no further property checks are made. If needed, this property should be created by the administrator using the GRUB kernel boot command line or the eeprom(1M) command.

atapi-cd-dma-enabled

This property is examined only for ATAPI CD/DVD devices, and only if ata-dma-enabled is not set to '0.'

If atapi-cd-dma-enabled is absent or set to '0,' DMA is disabled for all ATAPI CD/DVD's. If set to '1,' DMA is enabled and no further property checks are made.

The Solaris installation program creates this property in the boot environment with a value of '1.' It can be changed with the GRUB kernel boot command line or eeprom(1M) as shown in the Example section of this manpage.

atapi-other-dma-enabled

This property is examined only for non-CD/DVD ATAPI devices such as ATAPI tape drives, and only if ata-dma-enabled is not set to '0.'

If atapi-other-dma-enabled is set to '0,' DMA is disabled for all non-CD/DVD ATAPI devices. If this property is absent or set to '1,' DMA is enabled and no further property checks are made.

If needed, this property should be created by the administrator using the GRUB kernel boot command line or the eeprom(1M) command.

drive0_block_factor drive1_block_factor

ATA controllers support some amount of buffering (blocking). The purpose is to interrupt the host when an entire buffer full of data has been read or written instead of using an interrupt for each sector. This reduces interrupt overhead and significantly increases throughput. The driver interrogates the controller to find the buffer size. Some controllers hang when buffering is used, so the values in the configuration file are used by the driver to reduce the effect of buffering (blocking). The values presented may be chosen from 0x1, 0x2, 0x4, 0x8 and 0x10.

The values as shipped are set to 0x1, and they can be tuned to increase performance.

If your controller hangs when attempting to use higher block factors, you may be unable to reboot the system. For x86 based systems, it is recommended that tuning be performed using a duplicate of the /platform/i86pc/kernel directory subtree. This ensures that a bootable kernel subtree exists in the event of a failed test.

ata-revert-to-defaults revert—<diskmodel>

When rebooting or shutting down, the driver can set a feature which allows the drive to return to the power-on settings when the drive receives a software reset (SRST) sequence. If this property is present and set to 1, the driver will set the feature to revert to defaults during reset. Setting this property to 1 may prevent some systems from soft-rebooting and would require cycling the power to boot the system. If this property is not present the system will not set the feature to revert to defaults during reset.

To determine the string to substitute for <diskmodel>, boot your system (you may have to press the reset button or power-cycle) and then view /var/adm/messages. Look for the string "IDE device at targ" or "ATAPI device at targ." The next line will contain the word "model" followed by the model number and a comma. Ignore all characters except letters, digits, ".", "_", and "-". Change uppercase letters to lower case. If the string revert-<diskmodel> is longer than 31 characters, use only the first 31 characters.

Examples

Example 1 Sample ata Configuration File

# for higher performance - set block factor to 16
	drive0_block_factor=0x1 drive1_block_factor=0x1
	max_transfer=0x100
	flow_control="dmult" queue="qsort" disk="dadk" ;

Example 2 Revert to defaults property

revert-st320420a=1;

Output of /var/adm/messages:

Aug 17 06:49:43 caesar ata:[ID 640982 kern.info] IDE device at targ 0,
                           lun 0 lastlun 0x0
Aug 17 06:49:43 caesar ata:[ID 521533 kern.info] model ST320420A, stat

Example 3 Change DMA property using GRUB

To change a DMA property using the GRUB kernel boot command line:

Reset the system.
Press “e” to interrupt the timeout.
Select the kernel line.
Press “e.”
If there is no existing -B option:

Add: -B atapi-cd-dma-enabled=1

else...

Add: atapi-cd-dma-enabled=1 to the end of the current -B option. For example:-B foo=bar,atapi-cd-dma-enabled=1.
Press Enter to commit the edited line to memory. (Does not write to the disk and is non-persistent).
Press 'b' to boot the modified entry.

Example 4 Change DMA Property with eeprom(1M)

To enable DMA for optical devices while the Solaris kernel is running with the eeprom(1M) system command:

eeprom 'atapi-cd-dma-enabled=1'

Files

/platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/ata: Device driver.
/platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/ata.conf: Configuration file.
/boot/solaris/bootenv.rc: Boot environment variables file for Solaris x86. eeprom(1M) can be used to modify properties in this file.

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE	ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Architecture	x86