IBM / FreeBSD Install problem

Murray Taylor MTaylor at bytecraft.com.au
Fri Apr 20 00:25:37 UTC 2007


Thanks Jerry,

We have determined that our problem is related to the
god-awful mess known as ACPI.

With a single processor installed, it all boots fine, including
finding PCI busses 1 and 2 .... and the raid on the aac driver is
peachy!

With 2 or more processors installed, and ACPI enabled, it panics
with a madt error about id 38 is greater than the allowed max

And with ACPI disabled, it boots, but doesnt find PCI busses 1 and 2,
which is unfortunate as the RAID controller sits in PCI bus 1 ....
and the bge inet interface seems to be on PCI bus 2 .... 

So at present we are on the FC6 path, which is obviously much
softer on the vagaries of ACPI and is ignoring the crap data returns.

mjt


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jerry McAllister [mailto:jerrymc at msu.edu] 
> Sent: Friday, 20 April 2007 12:40 AM
> To: Murray Taylor
> Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List; freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: IBM / FreeBSD Install problem
> 
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 10:14:13AM +1000, Murray Taylor wrote:
> 
> > Server: IBM X3850 (88633SM)
> > CPU X 4: 40K2522
> > HDD X 6: 40K1051
> > IBM ServeRAID 8i: 39R8729
> > 
> > We are attempting to install FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE onto this 
> machine and
> > are running into a problem getting the operating system to 
> recognise the
> > RAID controller. As a result not finding any disks when it comes to
> > installing the O/S.
> > 
> > We have attempted various modifications to the boot 
> process, including
> > the loading of an "aac" module, which according to the BSD website,
> > should provide support for this type of controller.
> 
> I have only installed on a couple of raids and so don't know about
> them all or even this one.   So, this might not apply to your 
> situation.
> But, I found that I had to study DMESG very carefully to find 
> out what 
> device to use for them.   The system seemed to put out a lot 
> of messages 
> that looked like other device names but in the end there was just one 
> little line that pointed to the correct one.    The most 
> recent one was 
> a Dell Perc 3i or something like that and I had to run the fixit and 
> study the boot messages to figure it out.    I don't have that one 
> available to look at what it turned out to be, but it was more simple 
> than I first thought from all the stuff it wrote out.  After mucking
> with fixit a bit, then sysinstall seemed to figure it out OK.  I don't
> remember actually changing anything - just fishing around a while.
> I may have run fdisk under fixit to look at things and maybe delete
> some slices.
> 
> So, rather than trying to change things right off, I would suggest
> looking carefully at stuff and trying to determine what it is already
> doing.
> 
> Anyway, good luck,
> 
> ////jerry
> 
> > 
> > When we attempt to boot to OS to install after making these above
> > modifications, the boot loader advises that this module 
> already appears
> > to be loaded, which contradicts what I believe. In any respect, it
> > doesn't work either way (with or without the module 
> manually loaded).
> > 
> > One side note (which i don't think is contributing) is that when I
> > attempt to start the boot loader with ACPI enabled, it 
> freezes with the
> > message "cpu id 38 too high". However if I boot the boot loader with
> > ACPI disabled, this message dissapears. It _may_ be a 
> possibility that a
> > bi-product of disabling the ACPI is causing the RAID 
> controller to have
> > issues. This appears to be an issue because of the X4 CPU count ??
> > 
> > That's a quick summary of the problem we have, and the 
> path(s) we have
> > been down to date to attempt to fix it. Any help you can 
> provide would
> > be very much appreciated. We are at the position now where we are
> > prepared to pay for consulting services to get it going.
> > 
> > Dave Faulkner / Murray Taylor
> > 
> > Bytecraft Systems
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > 
> > "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It
> > takes a
> > touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite
> > direction."
> > --Albert Einstein 
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