5.1.0_pre10 AND freebsd (latest CAM) fail...

[Robert G. Brown]

Dear Doug and Justin,

There is good news and bad news.  First, 5.1.0_pre10 works "better".  It
booted my unbooted box, and booted one of my "problem" boxes that has
resisted booting up until now.  HOWEVER, I still have a couple of
systems that will not boot.  In addition, they seem to fail booting
(correctly) with the freebsd CAM-whatever image that I got via the URL
posted by Justin last week as well as with 5.1.0pre10, if I am
interpreting the freebsd boot correctly.

Under freebsd, I booted, entered the command line interface, and turned
off all devices but the fdc0, ahc, aic, sc0 and scd0 devices (thinking
the latter two might be needed?).  I also tried a full probe of all
devices, partial probes of just the non-conflicting devices, and several
other things, but this allowed me to focus on the problem.  freebsd
found the 7860 and attached cd-rom, but FAILED to find the 7890
altogether along with any of its devices.  The boot did not hang, there
was just "no controller there".  Whenever I got to the "install" menu
(by any boot path I tried) and tried a quick install, there was simply
no disk.

Under linux, it hung with a Data Parity Ram error (as usual) BEFORE any
reset message.  It did this whether or not MMAPIO was commented out in
the aic7xxx.c code (the one thing I knew to try).  It then looped
forever on this, fairly slowly, also as usual.

On the systems where it worked, it did seem to work better -- no reset,
and the whole initialization sequence was a bit faster/better.

SO, although I think the driver is getting really close, I don't think
that it is quite right under either BSD or linux.  Note that the two
systems that fail to boot are still "identical" to all the ones that do,
and one of them actually made it through a linux install to the hard
disk once before was power cycled and stopped working.  I reset the
Adaptec BIOS to its defaults for the 7890 (just to make sure) and there
is nothing remarkable about the system.  I suppose that the problem
could (always) be broken hardware but I see nothing during the boot to
suggest that it is -- it passes all self tests and the 7860/7890 BIOS
phase is boringly normal.

Let me know (either one of you) if there is anything I can do to help
debug the problem.  I'm going to try the freebsd disk in a couple other
2300's in a minute (ones that now seem to work with 5.1.0pre7-10) just
to make sure that it DID work correctly when I tried it on these last
week and reported success -- I might have been confused and saying that
it worked when only the 7860 showed up.

   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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