AHCI

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Hardware support

AHCI-compatible controllers are available from many vendors, generally motherboard chipset vendors. Known vendors include:

• ATI/AMD
• ASMedia
• Intel
• JMicron
• Marvell
• NVIDIA
• Promise
• SiS
• ULi
• VIA

Limitations

• CE3100 does not support PCI MSI at its SATA controller
• MCP65 revision A1 and A2 do not support PCI MSI at its SATA controller
• ICH and PCH supporting AHCI or RAID mode will suffer from SATA port sequence shift when switching from AHCI or RAID to IDE mode and vice versa
• 6 Gb/s SATA devices may not be detected on PCH x5x, xx5x, 34x0
• SATA devices may not be detected at the 3 Gb/s ports of B2 stepping PCH x6x, xx6x

Known problems

CE3100 Stepping A0 is not supported because workarounds are needed to fix errata:

• NCQ is broken
• DMA burst size must be 64 bytes at most
• SATA PCI header is not completely PCI compatible
• SATA PCI Device ID is wrong
• SATA memory mapped PCI header is wrong

If NCQ or hotplug do not to work for you, make sure the controller's BIOS setting is AHCI mode (not Legacy IDE mode).

Module options

skip_host_reset - Do not perform global host reset, upon driver load (0 = perform reset, 1 = skip reset)

Programmer documentation

Specifications publicly available for: AHCI 1.0 AHCI 1.1 AHCI 1.2 AHCI 1.3