Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 23:37:58 -0500 From: Doug Ledford <dledford@dialnet.net> To: "Robert G. Brown" <rgb@phy.duke.edu> Cc: aic7xxx Mailing List <AIC7xxx@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Any progress? Any hope? Anyone listening? Message-ID: <35EF6EA6.70B67D1C@dialnet.net> References: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980903221058.489A-100000@ganesh.phy.duke.edu>
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Robert G. Brown wrote:
>
> Dear Doug et. al.,
>
> I've verified, unfortunately, that a Dell Poweredge 2300 with onboard
> 7890 exhibits the following behavior:
>
> a) If directly booted with aic7xxx 5.1.0pre7 and 2.0.35 (SMP), it gets
> through the timeout reset and enters the Parity Error loop during the
> device probe. Sometimes it will return the attached device before
> spinning out forever.
>
> b) If FIRST booted from pre-installed WinNT (through its aic7xxx
> initialization) and THEN warm booted into linux with the same kernel
> used in a), it does the timeout reset, finds both attached devices (or
> all three) and proceeds to function normally (permitting full
> installation of linux on the disk and numerous -- warm -- reboots) until:
>
> c) The first time I power it down. When powered up, it recapitulates
> pattern a) but this time I HAVE no WinNT on the hard disk to reset the
> controller and cannot recover the system. Or rather, one boot in ten or
> thirty it appears to recover briefly but I cannot tell why.
>
> The pattern appears to be stable although my statistics on c) are still
> weak because I don't really want to trash my operating cluster to get
> better ones. Next major power out around here and I'm toast, though.
>
> STRONGLY appears like there is some bug in the initialization sequence
> that WinNT gets right and the linux aic7xxx gets wrong.
>
> Is there hope for me here? Is there anything I can do to help solve the
> problem? I have precisely one system left with WinNT preinstalled on
> the hard drive to play with, so if any fixes come down I can test them.
> I also have three boxes in the "dead" state -- I can probably run them
> totally diskless (no aic7xxx driver at all) but obviously this wastes
> some very expensive and actually fairly nice hardware...
There is hope. For now, go to line 319 in the pre8 driver and comment out
the # define MMAPIO inside of the #ifdef (__i386__) block. This turns off
MMAPed I/O and should get you booted up and running on these 2300 machines.
If that doesn't do the trick, then just hold on, I get my 2300 this
Saturday.
--
Doug Ledford <dledford@dialnet.net>
Opinions expressed are my own, but
they should be everybody's.
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