DragonFly 3.8 on Sony VAIO notebook with SSD?

[Alex Blake]

Understood. I can well believe that the hardware is broken since Sony and I have been here before. I’ll start by systematically toggling the BIOS options and option combinations that make sense. Failing that, I’ll hack the AHCI driver and return with the tale regardless. You're very gracious. Thanks for the time. 

Alex

On 20140608 at 02:58:12, Matthew Dillon (dillon at backplane.com) wrote:

AHCI timeouts shouldn't be happening at all, except possibly on the initial attach.  But not once the device has attached.

We don't have any boot hints for turning off tagged queueing.  That's a very basic part of the AHCI spec, if it doesn't work then the hardware is very badly broken.  That said, if serializing the commands resulted in successful operation under linux, it might stabilize it for DFly as well.  You would need to hack the AHCI driver to force the tags to 1 and then test to see if it fixes the stability issues on the Vaio.  The pertainant code is in ahci_cam.c line ~378.  If you are able to make it work we could add a formal hint to allow the boot loader to specify the behavior.  It obviously can't default to 1 tag, since that destroys the performance.

It is also possible that the BIOS might have options or features that can be adjusted that will stabilize operation.

-Matt


On Sat, Jun 7, 2014 at 5:08 PM, Alex Blake <ablake1 at acm.org> wrote:
Thanks! I did as you suggested and tried the DragonFly 3.8 IMG on the notebook today. Worked like a charm. Always believed that a  little courage goes a long way. So, rather than beat around the bush much longer, I ventured the install. At first, I got a lot of AHCI timeout errors, but they seemed to resolve on their own. 

Eventually, though, I landed at the install menu (hallelujah!) and went all in. The installation seemed to be going well, if a bit slowly, until it bailed with a kernel dump. If I weren’t such a proponent—indeed, an exponent—of DragonFly, the whole affair would’ve been tragic. I’d rather that DragonFly were an owner (rather than renter) on this notebook, but it’ll do while I study for my cert.

Thanks, again.
Alex

On 20140606 at 22:51:45, Justin Sherrill (justin at shiningsilence.com) wrote:

I've installed to a VAIO with success, but I'm sure it was an older
model than what you have. The best way to find out is to try; the
install ISO and IMG files are live, meaning that you can find out if
DragonFly works with it just by booting the image and logging in as
root - it will leave your disk untouched unless you run the installer.

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 10:12 PM, Alex Blake <ablake1 at acm.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Has anyone been able to install DragonFly on a Sony VAIO notebook? I lucked
> into the notebook (yay!) from my older brother who installed *unnamed*
> Linux, he said, by disabling native command queuing for the SSD. Is there a
> way, maybe, to do the same thing with DragonFly's installer? The latest
> (3.8) installer is the first to even recognize the SSD and I was hoping to
> make a go of it this time.
>
> Thanks,
> Alex
>

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