Several eSATA controllers, most notably the SiL ones driven by the sata_sil24 driver, support port multipliers. These are more and more coming out in external drive cases, such as the Sonnet 500P and several rack-mount models. The linux-sata website indicates that there is a patch to support port multipliers in the linux kernel, but it is nowhere to be found in gentoo - even with the latest kernel sources. This is a request for this support to be added. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Set up a system with external disks - say, three of them in an external eSATA array, connected by a single eSATA cable to a SiL3132 controller. 2. Boot the 2007.0 LiveCD with the intention of installing to a mirror on two of the drives. 3. Linux only sees the first drive in the array. It completely ignores the others. Actual Results: Only the first drive in the array is visible Expected Results: All drives in the array should be visible. There is an indication on http://linux-ata.org/software-status.html that port multiplier support is working. Can it be added to the gentoo sources? There are a lot of external SATA arrays coming out now that simply don't work with gentoo because of this.
This needs to be done upstream, see http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches/faq.htm
