IBM Netfinity 3500 and 5.5

[Toomas Aas]

Hello!

Is anyone successfully running RELENG_5_5 on IBM Netfinity 3500? I have
one such machine here (Type 8644-10X, with IBM ServeRAID 3L) that was
running RELENG_5_4 (and 5.3 before that, IIRC) quite happily. Now I cvsupped
to RELENG_5_5 and built a new world and kernel, but when booting the new
kernel the boot process just hangs after these two lines:

ata0: channel #0 on atapci0
ata1: channel #1 on atapci0

After these two lines have been printed, the machine hangs hard. Pressing
the NumLock key on the keyboard doesn't affect the NumLock led. Only thing
that remains to do is to press the power button.

Googling brought me (to my surprise) to FreeBSD 5.5-RELEASE i386 installation
notes that I had neglected to read. It says there that Netfinity 3500 may hang
when onboard NIC is configured. So I rebooted after disabling the onboard NIC
in BIOS, but that didn't help - booting still hangs at the same place.
Additionally the same problem is noted in installation notes for 5.4 and 5.3,
which run successfully on this box. And anyway, the hang happens long before
the NIC is configured (or even long before it is probed when 5.4 boots - not
sure about 5.5, maybe the device probing order has changed).

Other things I have tried (and all with same miserable results):

- Booting with GENERIC kernel
- Booting with ACPI disabled
- Removing all USB device support from kernel (during booting of FreeBSD 5.4,
   the next line in dmesg after ata0 and ata1 is uhci0)
- Disabling USB support in BIOS
- Disabling SMP support in BIOS

Anything else I should try, before cvsupping (cvsdowning?) back to RELENG_5_4?
I would like to avoid going to 6 right now, since that would involve a lot of
port rebuilding.

-- 
Toomas Aas