problems installing FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE on UltraSPARC IIe

[William Bulley]

According to Garance A Drosihn <drosih at rpi.edu>:

> What model of ATA controller is it?

I don't know and I don't know how to determine this.  Would it show
up in the FreeBSD boot log (like dmesg(8) ouput)?

If so, then this booting output is from what I sent in my first message:

   atapci0: <AcerLabs Aladdin UDMA66 controller>

> Did you test the other drives under solaris, or only under FreeBSD?

All our Sun Blades have the 40 GB Western Digital drives and Solaris
on them.  I replaced one of these with a brand new, blank, Western
Digital 40 GB drive and had the same disappointing results.  :-(

My point is that these Sun Blades work with Solaris.  I tried different
Sun Blades (as I said previously) just in case I had picked a bad system...

> It might be that other hard drives will work better once the newest
> ATA support is committed.  I went through all kinds of agony on 5.3
> with multiple types of hard drives, on multiple kinds of SATA disk
> controllers.  That agony included lots of "WRITE_DMA timed out" and
> "READ_DMA timed out" messages.  And I had plenty of recommendations
> that I needed to buy new hard disks.  I did do that, and I did switch
> SATA controllers (trying three different controllers), but those
> changes never really solved the problems, they only changed the nature
> of the trouble I was seeing.

This is most disheartening news to read, sigh...   :-(

> Things have been much better for me with the latest ATAng changes in
> 6.x-current, and we now have the even newer ATAmkIII changes (which I
> have not tried yet).  Admittedly all of my headaches were in i386, not
> sparc64, but it wouldn't surprise me if many of the same issues exist.

I don't much care what flavour of FreeBSD that I run on these uSPARC IIe
boxes, but I'd much prefer to run FreeBSD than OpenBSD or (shudder) Linux.

Regards,

web...

--
William Bulley                     Email: web at umich.edu