Update on Dells with 5.1.0pre7

[Robert G. Brown]

Dear List Humans,

I've spent the last couple of weeks after I got back from vacation
testing and installing our Dell poweredge boxes with the new pre7
revision, and have the following observations:

a) If I try to boot up a Dell system that has never been booted before
with a boot floppy/kernel containing the pre7 aic7xxx driver, it hangs
right after the timeout that occurs after downloading the sequencer
and during the attached disk probe.  The hang is the usual loop of
annoying Parity errors etc.  This is highly reproducible.

b) If I boot one of the Dell systems and let Windows NT (preinstalled
on the hard drive) get through its initial pre-installation routine,
during which it (presumably) installs its own aic7xxx drivers and the
like, and THEN boot from the SAME boot floppy, it boots "perfectly"
except for the single timeout during the attached device probe
previously reported on the list.  Thereafter, it appears to work
reasonably well -- I have now installed a dozen or so of the dual P2's
with 7890U2W and 7860 U onboard adapters without (yet, knock on wood)
any problems.

c) I'm a bit scared to power cycle these systems.  It seems to me that
there is likely some initialization code or steps missing from the
existing sequencer download and initialization process -- NT puts the
adapter in a state from which the linux driver works, but it doesn't
work from a powerup default state.  This is not in real disagreement
with my earlier observations of pre-[3-5] drivers that worked for
while and then "went away" when I unplugged the systems and moved
them.  Of course, after I install linux I can no longer boot up NT to
get them "sane" again.

Now, I don't have any idea what is going on or how to contribute
further to the debugging effort.  I have one system in reserve that
has never booted up NT from the disk, so I can test any possible fixes
that come up, if they come up fairly soon (I do need the system in
production before too long).  I will also test with one of my
existing systems whether or not a fully installed system still goes
away when power cycled.

Overall, the pre7 driver is pretty good -- the installed systems boot
locally and appear to run stably.  The powerup/initialization issue,
however, looms large and still unresolved.  If I were the paranoid
type, I'd mutter darkly about the Dell/Adaptec/Microsoft conspiracy
and some deliberate tweak of the Dell Bios that forces one to use NT,
but if this were true I'd have to kill somebody, so I'll continue to
think happy, flowery thoughts while awaiting the addition of some
magic initialization fix.

BTW, I haven't tried a freebsd boot disk against this problem, but I
do believe that I have an old one lying around that did indeed boot up
and find the 7890 AFTER an early NT boot.  I may try to boot my
un-NT-booted box with this to see if the problem is common to both, as
it may well be.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu




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