>>>Yesterday I've tried launching various kernels on Ahtlon64 Dual-core 
>>>X2 3800+ with MSI Neo4 Platinum SLI motherboard.
>>>
>>>The results were a total catastrophica failure. As soon as I enable 
>>>SMP in the kernel, the sata driver would randomly hang after a bit of 
>>>disk activity.
>>>
>>>Whenever apic is enabled, the system won't even be able to boot up 
>>>completely, and will hang VERY soon. Whenever I disable apic, the 
>>>system is able to bootup, but when the software mirror that I use will 
>>>try to resync for 2-3-10 mins, it will throw up a message and freeze 
>>>again.
>>>
>>>Whenever I disable apic AND lapic, the system is able to bootup AND 
>>>work, however after same 5-10 minutes it start spitting messages, 
>>>which are somewhat different thou and don't hang the system completely 
>>>but render it rather unusable anyway.
>>>
>>>As soon as I disable SMP - everything works like a charm.
>>>
>>I too am running an Athlon X2 using sata_nv. I have an ASUS motherboard. 
>>But what I noticed was that the problem went away if I used 2 gigs of 
>>ram instead of 4 gigs. When you use the whole 4 gigs there is some 
>>memory mapping going on and I thought perhaps the problem was related to 
>>the sata_nv not liking the memory mapped over the 4gig barrier.
> 
> That's possible.  Unfortunately I cannot verify this, since there are 2GB of
> RAM in my box.
> 
> I remeber someone having a problem with sata_nv DMAing over 2GB of RAM,
> so there may be something wrong with it.

On a second thought. Why would that only occur in SMP mode? Since now 
the box is with 3G ram, no SMP and it works like a charm. If I enable 
SMP - the hell breaks loose.

Anyone from the IDE drivers guru world has any ideas? :)

Regards,
Vladimir