Marvell MV88SX6081 on FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE

[Stephane LAPIE]

Dieter wrote:
> 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.

I'll try that the next time I have a chance to reboot that server.

> Let me guess, "Phoenix - AwardBIOS"?

...The very one.

As per kenv output :

smbios.bios.reldate="11/18/2008"
smbios.bios.vendor="Phoenix Technologies Ltd."
smbios.bios.version="2004Q3"
smbios.chassis.maker="TYAN Computer Corp"
smbios.memory.enabled="2097152"
smbios.planar.maker="Tyan Computer Corporation"
smbios.planar.product="S2895"
smbios.planar.serial="0123456789"
smbios.planar.version="TYAN Thunder K8WE S2895"
smbios.socket.enabled="2"
smbios.socket.populated="2"
smbios.system.maker="TYAN Computer Corp."
smbios.system.product="S2895"
smbios.system.serial="0123456789"
smbios.system.version="TYAN Thunder K8WE S2895"
smbios.version="2.33"


> 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.

Ouch.

> 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?

In my case I guess that would be it. I have never seen FreeBSD freeze on
BTX level when loading from media, on any other computer.

> 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

I also happen to have these ones, but with my Intel NICs (no way I'm
using the Marvell default ones, I get lost interrupt messages all over
the place when I crank up network I/O a bit)

> 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.

Just for the recall, it's more like "Could not load Option ROM" (I
recall it was because it was out of memory buffers for these, but I
don't have the exact message text available at hand), and it pops up
randomly ; sometimes as you said, full power cycles do help. Sometimes
they don't.

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

Definitely not...
-- 
Stephane LAPIE, EPITA SRS, Promo 2005
"Even when they have digital readouts, I can't understand them."
--MegaTokyo

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 261 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hardware/attachments/20091201/89c11154/signature.pgp