From owner-freebsd-stable Sat Sep 16 13:48: 3 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from turtle.looksharp.net (cc360882-a.strhg1.mi.home.com [24.2.221.22]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4D16F37B423; Sat, 16 Sep 2000 13:48:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (bandix@localhost) by turtle.looksharp.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA60413; Sat, 16 Sep 2000 16:48:05 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from bandix@looksharp.net) Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 16:48:04 -0400 (EDT) From: "Brandon D. Valentine" To: "Justin T. Gibbs" Cc: stable@freebsd.org, gibbs@freebsd.org, steve@freebsd.org, jkh@freebsd.org Subject: Re: MFC of ahc driver updates In-Reply-To: <200009162021.OAA02336@pluto.plutotech.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sat, 16 Sep 2000, Justin T. Gibbs wrote: >In actuality, I'm not sure exactly what in the RELENG-4 driver is >causing problems with the 7892. The driver in -current (before >today's commit) had several enhancements for U2 and U160 chips, >but did not contain any corrections for "SCB handling" as you >put it. First off, thanks for responding, Justin. Well, I must have misread the commit logs then. It appears that since then you have made several controller specific changes to the SCH paging and queueing and I assumed that one of them fixed the SCB related panics I was seeing. Sorry for any confusion, I'm not that familiar with your driver. >Unfortunately, the changes that were made to increase performance on >the U2/U3 and even some older chips in current exposed some chip->chipset >interactions to which I had previously been unaware. So, the driver >that works so well for you, will fail on some systems with onboard aic7880s >and just about any system with a 3940AUW, just to name the two most prominent >issues. This was the main reason the driver in -current has not been >merged to -stable. I wasn't aware of these issues. I have systems with aic7892's, 7895's and 7880's I would be willing to test code on then. >After more than a month of investigation, experimentation, and development, >I believe that the driver I committed to -current today will address the >issues with non U2/U3 chips. Unfortunately, I don't have hardware to >test against of the problems I discovered through investigation of Adaptec's >system testing data. So the question still remains as to whether the >driver in -current is stable enough to be merged back into -stable. > >Don't get me wrong. I want these issues to be resolved for -stable >and release users just as much as anyone else, but the only way to >do this safely and not wind up in a situation worse than we have now >is through expansive testing. I'd be more than happy to make patches >available relative to -stable (sys/dev/aic7xxx/... can simply be copied >to a 4.X system and it should work with an added register define in >sys/pci/pcireg.h and some minor changes to sys/conf/files), but I >can only sanction the merge to stable if adequate testing occurrs. That's great, but I can generate diffs. My problem is that I have boxen that won't even get through the install of 4.1 due to ahc problems. What I'm lamenting is having to roll my own install patchset to even get an OS loaded on the boxen. Thanks for your hard work, Justin, and let me know what I can do to help expedite the testing and subsequent merge. Brandon D. Valentine -- bandix at looksharp.net | bandix at structbio.vanderbilt.edu "Truth suffers from too much analysis." -- Ancient Fremen Saying To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message