Areca ARC-1120 on FreeBSD 7.0

[Andrew Hotlab]

> Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:20:36 -0700
> From: koitsu at FreeBSD.org
> To: mike at sentex.net
> CC: andrew.hotlab at hotmail.com; freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Areca ARC-1120 on FreeBSD 7.0
>
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 02:53:32PM -0400, Mike Tancsa wrote:
>> At 01:54 PM 8/12/2008, Andrew Hotlab wrote:
>>> I tried to boot without disks using the new firmware, but nothing
>>> changed! Then I created a new RAID0
>>> set/volume using only a single SATA drive (it was used as online
>>> spare), but still not success... I'm afraid
>>> to have ended any ideas about what it might be the cause of this trouble!! :(
>>>
>>> I'll go on changing PCI-X slot of the Areca card, but I'm going to
>>> became pessimistic about a successful
>>> end of this story... sigh!
>>
>>
>> MB BIOS update ?  On some more exotic boards I find I sometimes have to
>> disable some features, typically USB related, if there are problems.  Not
>> sure in your case.  I think MSI is enabled by default on 7 and not on 6,
>> so perhaps something on the board does not like that ?  Try disabling it
>> in the loader.conf
>>
>> hw.pci.enable_msi=0
>
> Don't forget MSI-X:
>
> hw.pci.enable_msix="0"
>
> --
> | Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
> | Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
> | UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
> | Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
>

Sorry for the late post, my Windows Live Hotmail mailbox suffered a disruption... :(

I flashed the BIOS of the Supermicro H8DAE with the latest update available (v1.1a to v1.1b). With
both the old and the new version of the BIOS to modify sysctl tunables do not resolve the problem, but
I've found that FreeBSD 7.0R boots successfully simply by changing the PCI-X slot for the Areca card!!!

I've also verified that 7.0R boots when only the RAID card is plugged in the system (removing the Intel
Pro/1000MT Quad Port adapter)... it might be changed something in the latest FreeBSD release causing
the fault with this particular hardware configuration.

Thanks you all very much to have supported me in solving this trouble... that system will be the
first physical Unix BSD host that can be considered in production in my network! I'm going to
begin the setup! :)

Andrew
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