From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Dec 31 16:40:50 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 397A316A4CE for ; Wed, 31 Dec 2003 16:40:50 -0800 (PST) Received: from smtp.covadmail.net (mx05.covadmail.net [63.65.120.65]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 70F8D43D1D for ; Wed, 31 Dec 2003 16:40:48 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from strick@covad.net) Received: (covad.net 24456 invoked from network); 1 Jan 2004 00:40:42 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mist.nodomain) (67.101.98.94) by sun-qmail12 with SMTP; 1 Jan 2004 00:40:42 -0000 Received: from mist.nodomain (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mist.nodomain (8.12.9p2/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i010ee3Q000370; Wed, 31 Dec 2003 16:40:41 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dan@mist.nodomain) Received: (from dan@localhost) by mist.nodomain (8.12.9p2/8.12.9/Submit) id i010eekf000369; Wed, 31 Dec 2003 16:40:40 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dan) Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 16:40:40 -0800 (PST) From: Dan Strick Message-Id: <200401010040.i010eekf000369@mist.nodomain> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org cc: dan@mist.nodomain Subject: Another 5.2-RC2 experience X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:40:50 -0000 I gave 5.2-RC2 a spin and found the following problems: 1) Intel ICH5 SATA still doesn't work in native mode. When I boot the installation floppy diskettes each of my two SATA drisk drives draws something in the range of 25-30 error messages of the general form: ad4: WARNING - READ DMA recovered from missing interrupt with a roughly 10 second pause before each message. Someone suggested that this was caused by a glitch in ACPI support, but this does not seem to be the case. I disabled the SATA controller and installed 5.2-RC2 on an old SCSI disk drive. When I boot the installed 5.2-RC2 with the SATA controller reenabled, the missing-interrupt problem does not always occur and is not suppressed by selecting the disabled-ACPI boot option in the beastie bootstrap menu. In fact, the SATA controller may seem to work just fine with the normal boot and then fail when I try the disabled-ACPI boot. The ICH5 SATA controller seems to work adequately well in both FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.1. 2) The gigabit ethernet controller on the i875P CSA bus (em driver), consistently fails (apparently continuously timing out and resetting) unless I boot with ACPI disabled (in which case it seems to work just fine). This device also seems to work correctly in both FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.1. 3) The UFS1 file system super block summary data incompatibility (with FreeBSD 4.9) is still a problem. I get the impression (from reading the traffic in the freebsd-current mailing list) that these problems are well known but considered to be rather unimportant. If this is the case, the release engineering team might as well get ahead of the game and describe these glitches in the 5.2-release errata now. :-) For me, problem (1) is fatal all by itself. Problem (2) would probably make using 5.2-RC2 unattractive even if there were no problem (1). Problems (1) and (3) make even testing 5.2-RC2 very inconvenient. (I probably won't try booting it again.) Before I completely gave up on 5.2-RC2 I went ahead and built the several dozen ports I normally use and stumbled over these glitches: - linux-devtools and linux-devtools-7 won't extract because the rpms XFree86-devel-4.whatever.i386.rpm are not available from any of the listed ftp sites - grub won't build (I forget why; some sort of compilation error) Dan Strick strick@covad.net