Any progress? Any hope? Anyone listening?

[Doug Ledford]

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 at dialnet.net>
  Opinions expressed are my own, but
     they should be everybody's.

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