6.0 RC1 - problems with HighPoint RocketRAID 1640?

[Neil Hoggarth]

Hi Folks,

I have an Athlon-XP 2500 system, nForce2 chipset, 1Gbyte of RAM. It uses 
a HighPoint RocketRAID 1640 PCI card as an SATA controller, which is 
probed as a couple of HPT374 chips:

atapci0: <HighPoint HPT374 (channel 0+1) UDMA133 controller> port 0xac00-0xacff,0xa800-0xa803,0xa400-0xa407,0xa000-0xa003,0x9c00-0x9c07 irq 18 at device 10.0 on pci1
ata2: channel #0 on atapci0
ata3: channel #1 on atapci0
atapci1: <HighPoint HPT374 (channel 2+3) UDMA133 controller> port 0xc000-0xc0ff,0xbc00-0xbc03,0xb800-0xb807,0xb400-0xb403,0xb000-0xb007 irq 18 at device 10.1 on pci1
ata4: channel #0 on atapci1
ata5: channel #1 on atapci1

I don't use the RAID features of the card; I'm just using it as a 4-port 
SATA controller and subsequently using geom_mirror to turn the four 
disks into two independent mirrored volumes.

I tried a source-upgrade from RELENG_5 to RELENG_6 over the weekend 
(cvsuped RELENG_6 at around 10am Sunday morning, UK time). I was using a 
GENERIC kernel. The procedure from UPDATING was working fine, up to the 
point when I ran "make installworld". The system froze solid very early 
in the installworld process (the comment printed on the screen prior to 
the freeze suggests that it was copying, or preparing to copy, include 
files).

When it became obvious that the system had wedged solid, I hit the reset 
button. During the subsequent reboot, geom_mirror commented that it 
wanted to rebuild the mirror that contains the root filesystem. Shortly 
afterwards things froze up again. I tried booting into fixit mode from a 
6.0 RC1 disk 2 CD-ROM, and also experienced hard lockups while fiddling 
with the disks. In the end I managed to get the system back running 
smoothly on 5.4-STABLE, by booting from /boot/kernel.old/kernel.

Are there any known issues with 6.0 and the HighPoint RocketRAID 1640?

Any pointers on how I might go about diagnosing this, and hopefully 
producing a more useful problem report concerning the difficultes that 
my hardware seems to have with 6.0 kernels?

Regards,
-- 
Neil Hoggarth                                Departmental Computing Manager
<neil.hoggarth at physiol.ox.ac.uk>                   Laboratory of Physiology
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~njh/                  University of Oxford, UK