kern/120296: Unstable SATA on MB with Nvidia MCP 570 SLI chipset.

[Morten Strårup]

>Number:         120296
>Category:       kern
>Synopsis:       Unstable SATA on MB with Nvidia MCP 570 SLI chipset.
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Tue Feb 05 17:20:01 UTC 2008
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Morten Strårup
>Release:        7.0 BETA4
>Organization:
>Environment:
nas# uname -a
FreeBSD nas.lightworkings 7.0-BETA4 FreeBSD 7.0-BETA4 #0: Tue Jan 29 19:43:09 CET 2008     root at nas.lightworkings:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
>Description:
I've been running 7.0-current since april or so without any significant trouble but now I've run into quite a showstopper.

Until now the hardware used has been a Via C7 1,2 GHz mini-itx system with 1 GB of RAM. But I've now bought some new hardware for use as a fileserver and this new hardware doesn't work very well with 7.0. It consists of an AMD BE2400 cpu, an MSI K9N SLI MCP motherboard with an Nforce 570 SLI chipset and 4 GB of RAM.

I've run both memtest86 and merseine prime test to make sure that it isn't the hardware that is faulty. I've tried changing the memory modules but that didn't help.

Other operating systems like Ubuntu Linux 7.10, NetBSD 4.0 and Freebsd 6.3 RC1 work just fine, but FreeBSD 7.0 does not. These have all been AMD64 versions. I've also tested 8.0-current which doesn't work either. I've tested the 7.0 and 8.0 installations with both AMD64 and i386 installations and none work.

For the AMD64 versions the errors consist of:

1. Errors about wrong fileformat when loading shared libraries.
2. Errors about missing symbol table.
3. Errors about not being able to load /etc/termcap when logging in.
4. Errors about relocations when loading shared libraries.
5. Errors about init making an error and then dumping me to singleuser and then not being able to load sh because of fileformat errors.

For the i386 versions the errors start when loading the BTX, where it complains about missing acpi modules and then crashes with a list of what the cpu registers contain.

The AMD64 errors sometimes also show up when installing the 7.0-BETA4.
>How-To-Repeat:
Install FreeBSD with disks connected to motherboard chipset, errors will show up when booting the machine from disk.
>Fix:


>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: