aic-7880p netfinity 5500 m10

[Robert G. Brown]

On Wed, 3 Mar 1999, Joe Garcia wrote:

> Opps just noticed an typo, the chip set is AIC-7880P not AIC-7800P

I wish I could help, but I've never used the Netfinity device.  I
believe (looking at the source) that the 7880 is supported by the
version of aic7xxx that comes with RH 5.2 (I use it flawlessly on
2940's, 7860's, 7890's, and 7895's).  The thing that concerns me is that
the SCSI controller itself is somehow functioning as a RAID device in
whatever IBM put together.  Some of the ways they might have
accomplished this would leave the unbroken 7880 interface as the proper
kernel hook, but I could also imagine lots of ways where they might have
broken the interface to support some RAID feature or another.  The
aic7xxx driver works by downloading a bunch of sequencer code to the
controller when everything is initialized, and it wouldn't take much
alteration to render everything dysfunctional.

When you say "cannot recognize this card" what exactly do you mean?
Does it fail to find it altogether, or find it but fail to initialize it
correctly and thereby hang?  I believe that the aic7xxx module has some
debug options still embedded that Doug Ledford might be able to help you
with to debug things if it finds it but is failing to bring it up
correctly.  If it fails to find it at all and /proc/pci on a floppy or
diskless boot doesn't show any PCI devices with numbers:

#define PCI_DEVICE_ID_ADAPTEC_7880      0x8078
#define PCI_DEVICE_ID_ADAPTEC_7881      0x8178
#define PCI_DEVICE_ID_ADAPTEC_7882      0x8278
#define PCI_DEVICE_ID_ADAPTEC_7883      0x8378
#define PCI_DEVICE_ID_ADAPTEC_7884      0x8478

and there are no numbers LIKE these numbers left as "unknown PCI
devices" then I'd worry about things like whether or not the card is
correctly inserted in the PCI slot or the PCI bridge is functional or
whether or not to "give" IBM a lit bottle of gasoline in return:-).

Just kidding.  Actually I'm happy with IBM these days because they are
committing to linux very strongly.  However, if they've tweaked the 7880
sequencer code or mucked around with the PCI identification, you're
going to have to work very hard with Doug Ledford and possibly a
kernel/PCI expert to make things work.

    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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