Brett, thanks for quick response.

>> My hardware is SMP Supermicro with 6 disks on
>> Marvell MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 03)
>> and the sata_mv.c is version 0.25 dated 22 Oct 2005
>>
>> The thing works with "old" mvsata340 driver, but the "new" kernel with
>> your driver freezes when it starts to probe disks.  Even Magic SysRq
>> does not work.  The last lines I see on screen are like this:
>>
>> sata_mv version 0.25
>> ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:03.0[A] -> GSI 56 (level, low) -> IRQ 185
>> sata_mv(0000:02:03.0) 32 slots 8 ports unknown mode IRQ via MSI
>> ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x0 ctl 0xF8C22120 bmdma 0x0 irq 185
>> ata2: .... <same things>            0xF8C24120 ...
>> ...
>> ata8: .... <same thing>             0xF8C38120 ...
>> ATA: abnormal status 0x80 on port 0xF8C2211C
>> ... <five more lines identical to the above>
>> ata1: dev 0 ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 781422768 sectors: LBA48
>>
>> - and at this point it freezes hard.
>> Any suggestions for me?  Any information I can collect to help
>> troubleshooting?
[...]
> In the meantime, try turning off SMP and seeing if that makes a
> difference.  There still might be a problem with the spinlocks and if so
> it should go away in uniprocessor mode.

'nosmp' makes no difference.

If somebody on the list has suggestions or questions, please CC to me as
I am not subscribed to these maillists.

Eugene