Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 19:47:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Simon Shapiro <shimon@simon-shapiro.org> To: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG, Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> Subject: Re: Alpha Install - oops! Message-ID: <XFMail.980831194751.shimon@simon-shapiro.org> In-Reply-To: <13802.61200.986416.952138@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>
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Andrew Gallatin, On 31-Aug-98 you wrote:
> 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.
How?
(I think there is a problem we may want to solve here, still)
...
> > 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.
Wow!
Simon
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