Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 16:40:28 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> Cc: Simon Shapiro <shimon@simon-shapiro.org>, freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Alpha Install - oops! Message-ID: <13802.61200.986416.952138@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.01.9808311656050.357-100000@herring.nlsystems.com> References: <XFMail.980831114951.shimon@simon-shapiro.org> <Pine.BSF.4.01.9808311656050.357-100000@herring.nlsystems.com>
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Doug Rabson writes:
> > After all the kernel starts, init seems to fork and then put the message:
> >
> > ``Enter shell pathname or RETURN for SH:''
> >
> > It outputs this string a word or so at a time, with about a second delay
> > between pieces. Then the system is solidly frozen.
> >
> I have seen this behaviour very rarely. I think sometimes my code which
> enables ISA interrupts doesn't work properly on the Miata but I can't
> figure out a pattern yet. Try rebooting a couple of times to see if it
> unsticks itself.
I think you may have more luck if you power-cycle the box. When I've
seen this under NetBSD/alpha, I suspected it was caused by the IDE
controller acting as a noise generator, and was able to cure it by
disabling the ide controller.
> I haven't had much luck putting non DEC vga cards into the 433au which I
> have. The SRM console barfs something about an invalid device and then
> halts. That might just be a firmware problem and I have only tried using
> an MGA Mill II as a replacement for the TGA card which came with it so
> your mileage may vary.
This happens if you attempt to put an 'unverified' card onto pci bus 0
(and thus expose it to the pyxis DMA bug present in non-GL miatas).
See my Miata brain-dump below for an explanation, bearing in mind that
a DPW {433,500,600}{a,au} == "Miata" or "MiataGL"
A MiataGL can be distingiushed from a Miata by the presense of a
Cypress SIO (aka "PCI Peripheral Controller") chip in place of the
Intel SIO chip at Bus 00 Slot 07 (from SRM '>>>show config'). A
non-GL Miata has some nasty PCI bugs, including problems doing DMA
reads across page boundaries. All Miatas are equipped with a 21x52
pci-pci bridge which breaks up DMA's at page boundaries. The 3 32-bit
PCI slots sit behind the ppb. The 2 64-bit slots sit directly on the
primary PCI bus. To avoid problems with cards which are not safe for
Digital UNIX (eg, they're not certain they don't do DMA reads across
page boundaries), DEC put a hack into the SRM console which prevents
you from placing unverified cards directly on the primary PCI bus.
If you know a card & its driver are "safe", or if you're on a MiataGL,
you can get around this by setting the undocumented SRM console
variable 'pci_device_override' to the PCI device id followed by the
pci vendor id. Eg, for a card with the VendorID 0x10e8 & Device ID
0x8043, one may use:
>>> set pci_device_override 804310e8
In later versions of the firmware, I hear that you can just set it to -1.
On a Miata-GL that I just uncrated this afternoon (with version
V6.8-44 of the firmware), pci_device_override no longer needs to be
set.
Drew
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Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin
Duke University Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu
Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590
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