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ISO9001:2000国际质量管
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| Serial ATA (SATA) chipsets — Linux support status |
Problem: Serial ATA (also known as S-ATA or SATA) chipsets are rapidly replacing legacy "parallel ATA" (PATA, i.e., regular ATA/133) chipsets — but many Linux installers' kernels don't yet support many Serial ATA chipsets. If yours isn't supported, you have an installation obstacle. SUSE Linux 9.3 and later's installation kernel, Fedora Core 3 and later's, CentOS 4.1 and later's, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and later, Gentoo Linux 2004.3 and later's, Knoppix 3.7 and later's, Debian 3.1/sarge and later's (especially when started with the "bf2.6 boot flavour" boot image), Slackware 10.2 w/test26.s boot option, Xandros Desktop OS 3.0 and later's, Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) Linux 5.04 "hoary hedgehog" and later's, Vector Linux 5.1 and later's, Libranet 3.0 and later's, MEPIS Linux 3.3.1 and later's, Kanotix 2005-03 and later's, Linspire 5.0 and later's, PCLinux OS preview .81 and later's, ArkLinux's, and Mandriva Linux 2005 and later's all have a good selection of the required drivers. Scott Kveton's Debian netinst image does, likewise — see Links/Resources.
Note: There is no such thing as a distribution or its installer (generically) "having SATA support" (or not). Please send anyone speaking in such terms to this page. (Some SATA chipsets have been supported since practically forever, as their programming interfaces are unchanged from PATA predecessors. Others are brand-new and require new drivers from scratch.)
There are three workaround options:
1. Switch the motherboard BIOS back to "legacy ATA mode" (parallel ATA = PATA). Complete a Linux installation. Fetch or build a kernel with support for your chipset. Switch the BIOS setting back. (Potential catch: It's claimed that Dell Optiplex GX270 and Dell Precision Workstation 360 desktop units, using Intel ICH5 SATA-I chipsets, don't support switching to legacy ATA mode. This might be true of some others.)
2. Rebuild your installer using kernel 2.4.27 or later, which includes libata, desirable since it adds many new chipsets and gives a (potential, subject to physical read limits, etc.) ~10M/s speed boost to some others compared to the quite slow 2.4.x drivers/ide set.
3. Temporarily add a regular PATA drive to your system. Install Linux onto that. Fetch or build a kernel with support for your chipset. Migrate your system to the SATA drives.
Driver Overview: Linux kernels have two ATA ("IDE") driver sets:
"drivers/ide": This is the traditional ATA driver set, maintained by Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz (before that, Andre Hedrick). Contrary to popular belief, it includes low-level drivers for many common SATA chipsets.
Optionally, on top of drivers/ide block-device (generic mass storage access) drivers, one can load drivers to provide software-level suport for BIOS services enabling various types of manufacturer-specific software RAID (called "fakeraid", below):
For 2.4 kernels, Linux's software-RAID (fakeraid) driver collection is called "ataraid", which has subdrivers for the various manufacturers' different software RAID schemes. Using ataraid results in your partitions being addressed using a /dev/ataraid/d0p1 (etc.) device-naming convention. Note: Support greatly improved circa-2.4.23.
For 2.6 kernels, Linux's software-RAID (fakeraid) driver collection is called "dmraid" (Device Mapper RAID). So far (Sept 2004), Promise Fasttrack, Highpoint 37X, Intel ICH5/6, LSI, and SiI 3112A/Medley are supported: http://tienstra4.flatnet.tudelft.nl/~gerte/gen2dmraid/
I'm pretty sure manufacturers' proprietary drivers, where available, are designed to fit the above framework.
"libata": This is the newer ATA driver set for selected SATA chipsets only, maintained by Jeff Garzik, leveraging the kernel's well-tested SCSI layer. Garzik developed it in the 2.6 kernel series. 2.4 support was available only with a backported patch until libata's inclusion in 2.4.27 and later.
libata causes each SATA port appear as a new SCSI bus. There are individual low-level drivers for the individual SATA chipsets, e.g., ahci, ata_adma, ata_piix, sata_nv, sata_promise, sata_sil, sata_sx4, sata_svw, sata_via, sata_vsc.
Hardware RAID cards have drivers outside these two collections (e.g., 3w-xxxx, 3w-9xxx, aacraid, cciss, dac960, dpt_i2o, gdth, ips, megaraid, megaraid2, mpt*).
Driver Support for Each Known SATA Chipset:
(Caveats: Don't assume this page's data are perfect. Also, if a card's price makes it seem too good to be true, it probably is.)
The first and more-important of two issues raised by these chipsets is what's required to make Linux see block devices on them at all. |
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