# Timeout at starting-up caused by a PCIe SATA 6 Controller



## Anonymous (Nov 8, 2011)

The relevant system information is:

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p4
CPU: Intel Atom CPU D510 - MiniITX board
DELOCK 95225 MiniPCIe I/O PCIe full size 2 x SATA 6 Gb/s

The chipset of the SATA controller is the Asmedia ASM1061, and according to a recent thread in this forum, some controller cards with this chipset do work with FreeBSD. As a matter of fact, my DELOCK card does work also. I could boot the system from a 3TB Hitachi drive attached to that controller, as well as a DVD drive attached to this controller is working as expected.

However, I have a timeout issue with this card on starting up, and the system is waiting for apprx. 3 min. before it finishes the booting process - here comes an excerpt of the output of the dmesg command:


```
ahci0: <AHCI SATA controller> port 0x2028-0x202f,0x2034-0x2037,0x2020-0x2027,0x2030-0x2033,0x2000-0x201f
mem 0xf0200000-0xf02001ff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci2
ahci0: [ITHREAD]
ahci0: AHCI v1.20 with 2 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier supported
ahcich0: <AHCI channel> at channel 0 on ahci0
ahcich0: [ITHREAD]
ahcich1: <AHCI channel> at channel 1 on ahci0
ahcich1: [ITHREAD]
...
...
...
ahcich0: Timeout on slot 0
ahcich0: is 00000000 cs 00000001 ss 00000000 rs 00000001 tfd 6451 serr 00000000
ahcich0: Timeout on slot 0
ahcich0: is 00000000 cs 00000001 ss 00000000 rs 00000001 tfd 2451 serr 00000000
ahcich0: Timeout on slot 0
ahcich0: is 00000000 cs 00000001 ss 00000000 rs 00000001 tfd 2451 serr 00000000
```

In the moment I can use only one of the two SATA slots, because the other one is physically blocked by other connectors on the motherboard. So, perhaps the timeout is caused by the free SATA slot.

Anyway, is there a possibility to reduce the Time until Out from 1 minute to let's say a second or so?

Are there any other options, besides using the solder iron and removing the blocking connectors from the motherboard?

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

Best regards

Rolf


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## mav@ (Nov 8, 2011)

Can you show verbose (boot -v) messages? Empty port should not cause timeouts, unless it was improperly detected as connected. Timeouts of 30 seconds are usual for ATA/SATA. For device detection period they are hardcoded now. Reducing them is not safe, as many disks require abound 15 seconds just to spin-up.


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## Anonymous (Nov 8, 2011)

mav@ said:
			
		

> Can you show verbose (boot -v) messages? Empty port should not cause timeouts, unless it was improperly detected as connected. Timeouts of 30 seconds are usual for ATA/SATA. For device detection period they are hardcoded now. Reducing them is not safe, as many disks require abound 15 seconds just to spin-up.



In the meantime, I figured that it is not the empty slot that is timing out, but it is the one that is connected, and the timeout occurs in either case, with a SATA DVD drive or with a SATA HD connected to the slot.

The dmesg output was too big for including it into the body of this messages, so I attached it as a .zip file.

Many thanks for your kind response.

Best regards

Rolf


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## mav@ (Nov 13, 2011)

It looks strange. According to "cs 00000001 ss 00000000 rs 00000001" some command was submitted, but not completed. Same time "tfd 2451" means that command was completed with ABORT error. Unluckily I can't see here what command has failed. Are the error messages the same for DVD and HDD and in both cases devices work fine after them?


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## Anonymous (Nov 14, 2011)

mav@ said:
			
		

> It looks strange. According to "cs 00000001 ss 00000000 rs 00000001" some command was submitted, but not completed. Same time "tfd 2451" means that command was completed with ABORT error. Unluckily I can't see here what command has failed. Are the error messages the same for DVD and HDD and in both cases devices work fine after them?



mav@,

Many thanks for looking into this. After switching the devices between the slots, all of a sudden, the problem went away. The principal hard disk is now at ahcich0 (first slot of the PCIe SATA 6 Controller). ahcich1 is empty. A second hard disk is attached to ahcich2 (first built-in slot), and the DVD drive is at ahcich3, and everything is running fine so far. Unfortunately, this gives no indication, what may have caused the timeout in the first place.

Best regards

Rolf


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