Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 23:35:00 +0000 From: Gunther Schadow <gunther@aurora.regenstrief.org> To: Larry Baird <lab@gta.com> Cc: freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG, phk@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: the fla driver definitely has bugs ... Message-ID: <3AE75F24.564CC9D4@aurora.regenstrief.org> References: <200104052057.QAA69722@gta.com>
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Larry Baird wrote: > I hae thousands of systems installed using the fla driver and > 8MB DOCs without any problem. Initially based upon FreeBSD 3.5., > now based upon 4.2. I'm sorry but I can't confirm that. I have nothing but trouble with the fla device with all 5 boxes that I'm trying to configure. So, I know I don't just have a foul chip. - "stray irq 7" is something that should not ever happen in a clean kernel certainly not when mounting or otherwise accessing a flash disk device. - There is so much magic involved that I don't even dare to create a fresh flash filesystem. I have one image that appears to work and I use that as a template just writing different kernels and configs to it. - The magic as far as I can tell must have to do with the order in which physical "disk" blocks are written. The exact same files can be written such that the system won't boot at all (anything from errors while loading the kernel to panics early in the initialization phase of the kernel can happen) but if written with this magic template and fingers crossed and on a full moon it will work. (It's as if when blocks of the kernel file are not all in a row, the file will be deemed corrupted or something.) This is completely obscure to me and quite annoying, especially since my other device that uses Compact Flash has just *no* problems with any of this, period. So I know I'm not doing anything obvious wrong, I just seem to be falling into the gaps of a brittle device / driver combination. BTW: the systems on which I have problems are the Flytech NetPC B62 systems with 8 MB DiskOnChip. The computers are quite fine otherwise, just that this stupid DiskOnChip thing causes me to rip my hair out. (As you can hear in my tone.) Has anyone from the PicoBSD crew any advice as to why the ordering in which files are written can decide between live or die of an installation? regards -Gunther -- Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow@regenstrief.org Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care Adjunct Assistent Professor Indiana University School of Medicine tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
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