FreeBSD 5.3 on Digital Personal Workstation 500au

[Bernd Walter]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 07:00:45PM -0400, benash at eecs.umich.edu wrote:
> OK, it looks like I fixed the problem.  I needed to have the SCSI card in a
> 64-bit slot WHILE the other two cards were removed (so that nothing was plugged
> into a 32-bit slot).  The 5.3 installation seemed to complete without trouble,
> and I am able to login as root.
> 
> Any ideas as to why this fixed things?

Alphas intialize IO ranges on chips that aren't configured on
PCI-PCI bridges and FreeBSD doesn't check the path.
Therefor a driver may access io addresses that aren't configured, or
configured differently enough to trap.
The whole story with FreeBSD PCI code and bridges on alpha systems
is very unsatifiying.
The main point is to get our PCI layer to do a path check and refused
unavailable ranges, the other point is to get more drivers compatible
with memory ranges.

-- 
B.Walter                   BWCT                http://www.bwct.de
bernd at bwct.de                                  info at bwct.de