Upgrade from 8.2-STABLE to 9.0-RELEASE wedges on SuperMicro H8DGiF-based system

[Freddie Cash]

2012/1/9 Daniel Kalchev <daniel at digsys.bg>:
> On Jan 9, 2012, at 8:03 PM, Freddie Cash wrote:
>
>> Small correction:  these are AMD Opteron 6218 CPUs, not 2218.
>>
>>> Hardware (alphadrive):
>>>  Chenbro 5U rackmount chassis with 24 hot-swap drive bays
>>>  SuperMicro H8DGi-F motherboard
>>>  AMD Opteron 6218 CPU (8-cores at 2.0 GHz)
>
> You meant Opteron 6128 perhaps?

Yes, 6128.  Aren't typos fun?  :)

> This looks weird coincidence indeed and considering the comments so far I too would question ACPI (BIOS revision, settings etc) and the possibility for some hardware going bad.

I've upgraded the BIOS to v2.00 same as betadrive.  However, using the
exact same BIOS settings as betadrive causes the SATA controllers and
onboard igb(4) interfaces to not be detected.  At all.  Nothing in
dmesg or pciconf.  Resetting BIOS settings to "Failsafe settings"
shows the SATA controllers and onboard NICs.  Now the fun begins to
figure out which setting in the BIOS is causing this.

I'm starting to lean toward a hardware issue with either the CPU
(since most of the chipset is in the CPU nowadays) or the motherboard.

Have a few more tests to run to try and narrow things down.

> Is it possible that you might have touched any hardware just before the upgrade? I had few cases an old system "die" on me when doing "minor" cleaning etc just before an update…

We bumped the RAM from 8 GB to 24 GB mid-December, to better support
dedupe.  Was running fine with the extra RAM.  Other than that, the
hardware has not been touched since it was first installed. And it's
been sitting in the server room since July 2011.


-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com