Marvell MV88SX6081 on FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE

[Dieter]

In message <4B1392CF.5090600 at darkbsd.org>, Stephane LAPIE writes:

> >> Therefore, I am inclined to think the motherboard/memory (a "TYAN
> >> Thunder K8WE S2895") would be at fault here,
> >=20
> > I have been told that Tyan does a good job with memory, although even
> > assuming that's true it could still be a memory problem.  My Tyan
> > board has a memory scrubbing feature that can be turned on in
> > firmware, but I've never tried it.  Also, you could try rotating the
> > SIMMs and see if anything changes.
> 
> The memory is brand new, from Corsair. I tried swapping the sticks
> (while still using the same slots) and strangely enough, some
> combinations just... don't boot at all.

That sounds like a major clue that you probably have a very bad stick
of memory (probably a hard error).  I would try booting with just 1 stick
at a time (or whatever the minimum is for your board) and isolate the bad
stick.

Most likely with 7.2 something landed on the bad location that doesn't
actually get used, but with 8.0 something disk related lands there.

> Also, completely unrelated to the SATA controller, some quirks on this
> motherboard (though at BIOS level) have been annoying me quite a lot :
> - Booting FreeBSD from anything besides an IDE device has a 80% chance
> of freezing the computer at BTX level.
> - Sometimes the Option ROMs (this including the VGA card) are not loaded
> properly because of an "out of memory" problem at BIOS level.
> 
> However, once the system is booted, it can go on for several months.
> (Though, I have witnessed one "Fatal error 12: Page fault"-type kernel
> panic in six months)

Let me guess, "Phoenix - AwardBIOS"?
On mine they can't even spell the name of the board correctly:
"TYAN Tomact K8E BIOS V1.00       022105"
(should be Tomcat)  Such quality control.

Mine hangs in boot if I have 2 JMB363 cards in the 2 PCIe x1 slots.
Moved one to the x16 slot and it boots.  I've been blaming the
JMB363 cards but maybe the Phoenix AwardBIOS is the problem child?

Most of the time one of the cards doesn't do it's display the drives
and give me 5.1 nanoseconds to hit some control character to
enter a setup-a-raid thingy.  And frequently FreeBSD doesn't see
one of the controllers and thus doesn't make it to multiuser.  I'd
expect these events to be correlated but oddly they don't seem to be.
Sometimes it takes several reboots to get all the controllers seen.
I haven't seen an "out of memory" message, but the way things fly by
perhaps I just missed it.  It always works correctly the first time
after a power cycle, so my theory is that the expansion cards aren't
getting reset properly.  I have a firewire PCI card that got into
a funky mode and rebooting didn't fix it but a power cycle did.

Tyan is supposed to be tier 1 but they aren't doing themselves
any favors with that pathetic excuse for firmware.