Marvell 88SE9235 PCI SATA card in LibreELEC

[StefanRvO]

Hi

I have a Marvell 88SE9235 SATA PCI card(https://www.aliexpress.com/item/SATA-III...06828.html) attached to my ROCKPRO64 which i would like to use together with LibreELEC. However, drivers plugged into the card doesn't show up, so i think i may be missing some drivers.

I am running the latest LibreELEC build. with kernel 4.4.154.

I was previously running ayufan's ubuntu build, but couldn't get video acceleration to work in kodi, so i switched to LibreELEC where it seems to work without problems. However, my disks did show up when i ran Ubuntu, which makes me think it is probably a problem with the kernel drivers.

I actually tried compilling kodi myself, and set these extra kernel build options. However it did not seem to make any difference:
CONFIG_ARCH_MV78XX0=y
CONFIG_ARCH_DOVE=y
CONFIG_SATA_MV=y
CONFIG_SCSI_MVSAS=y
CONFIG_MACH_RD78X00_MASA=y
CONFIG_MARVELL_PHY=y
CONFIG_RAID_ATTRS=y
CONFIG_SCSI_NETLINK=y
CONFIG_SCSI_MQ_DEFAULT=y

If anybody have any ideas to what i might be missing to get the SATA card working?

Regards
Stefan

[StefanRvO]

So, i managed to get the driver compiled into the kernel. Here is a link to my changed kernel config (located in projects/Rockchip/devices/RK3399/linux/rockchip-4.4/linux.aarch64.conf in the libreelec repo).

https://gist.github.com/StefanRvO/4607ce...977616ac47

However, the kernel seems to panic (e.g., the system freezes up) when i try to access the drive by e.g. doing file -s /dev/sda1
This also happened on ubuntu, so it seems to be a general problem. Does anybody have any experience or suggestions for fixing this? It seems strange to me, as the system can actually read from the drive as it can read the parition table, but something seems broken with actually accessing the data.

[p1x3l3d]

Hi Stefan,

It seems the Marvell 88SE923x cards do not work well with the RockPro64. See the problems that MisterA and myself have when trying to use the card with MrFixit's Feature-complete Debian Build image. The chipsets on our PCI-cards get very hot when the RockPro64 is turned on with the card inserted.

Could you check if the chipset on your PCI-card gets hot when the RockPro64 is powered on? Yours seems to have a heatsink on it, which is good. I own the Highpoint Rocket 640L (housing the Marvell 88SE9230 chipset) which doesn't have a heatsink. I'm actually afraid to use it now :p

[Bullet64]

Hi Stefan,

It seems the Marvell 88SE923x cards do not work well with the RockPro64. See the problems that  MisterA and myself have when trying to use the card with MrFixit's Feature-complete Debian Build image. The chipsets on our PCI-cards get very hot when the RockPro64 is turned on with the card inserted.

Could you check if the chipset on your PCI-card gets hot when the RockPro64 is powered on? Yours seems to have a heatsink on it, which is good. I own the Highpoint Rocket 640L (housing the Marvell 88SE9230 chipset) which doesn't have a heatsink. I'm actually afraid to use it now :p

Hmm, that's not correct. My 88SE9230 runs very well since month. 24/7 Chip is warm.

I have an raid1 with two 2.5'' HDD. What we have done, to run this card? Please read this thread in my forum. (Sorry, only german)

On this kernel it's running.

Code:

Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.0.0-1101-ayufan-g41eeb7cd789e aarch64)

[p1x3l3d]

Hi Bullet64, awesome, thanks! I was not aware of this. Will definitely check out your forum.

24/7 Chip is warm.

I suppose I should add a heatsink to the card myself then.

Sorry for any mistakes. English is not my native language

No problem. Ich bin Holländer, also glaube ich das zu verstehen

[StefanRvO]

I tried some of the suggestions in the treath, but didn't manage to get the card working, so I have kind of given up on it. I have board some USB -> SATA connectors instead.

[p1x3l3d]

I also switched to the latest Ayufan image (0.8.0rc10) with the latest kernel (linux-image-5.0.0-1105-ayufan-g2d7c76c290dc) and the card is still not coming up. I think the card might have died, as lspci gives some worrying feedback, something like 'libpci error: cannot access pci address 0:00:00'. It only says this when I boot up the system with the card inserted. With the card removed no error is returned. I'm certain that I've seen lspci return info about the card earlier on, so the card must've died recently. Shame, it was brand new!