aha2940 aic7xxx driver lockup...

[Mike Bilow]

Charles P. Kollar wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 CPK> I have a linux system/kernel 2.0.36 and two scsi cards.
 CPK> One is the aha2940 (one cd-r drive, and one hp tape drive).
 CPK> The other is a DPT EDTA controller.

 CPK> When I configure the kernel to know about the aic7xxx device
 CPK> the kernel appears to lockup on reboot in the aic7xxx
 CPK> driver. 

 CPK> It gets to "downloading sequencer code ... 412 instructions
 CPK> downloaded" and then it hangs.

 CPK> Is this a known problem with this driver? I am using suse
 CPK> 6.0 linux which was built around january 99. Could you
 CPK> please point me to the most recent version of this driver?

I can't actually fix your problem, but we had the same experience with great
frustration and I can tell you how we worked around it.

The very latest versions of the aic7xxx driver did not fix the problem for us.
I ended up becoming convinced that the underlying cause was a conflict between
the aic7xxx driver and some other driver.  By using a kernel which was built
with only the minimum set of SCSI drivers needed for the machine, we were able
to get a system that would boot stably.  In our case, since we were using the
Debian distribution, we used Gregory Norris' boot disks for Debian 2.1 which
were built with no SCSI drivers other than the aic7xxx driver and which are
patched to the latest version of this driver.

We also ended up using a 2.2 kernel (2.2.5, actually) instead of a 2.0 kernel
(2.0.36) because we had a lot of erratic behavior associated with IRQ handling,
although I believe this was SMP-related in our case.
 
-- Mike




To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo at FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe aic7xxx" in the body of the message