Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 20:45:44 -0400 (EST) From: Simon Shapiro <shimon@simon-shapiro.org> To: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: DPT Hangs at Boot (Especially with 2.2.7) Message-ID: <XFMail.981026204544.shimon@simon-shapiro.org>
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[ To those who do not know; I am the orignal author and the maintainer of
the DPT drivers for FreeBSD ]
Recently I have been receiving a rather constant stream of complaints that
sound more or less like:
When running DPT PM3334 (mainly) on FreeBSD 2.2.7 (almost always) I run
into the problem where the system simply hangs during boot, or during
fsck, or when switching from single-user to multi-user. The system also
tends to hang when the system installation creates new file-systems
during fresh installation. When the system freezes, diagnostic LED 1
is either permanently ON, or slowly blinking.
The motherboard I have is ASUS model ____ (almost always and has a
300MHz (or faster) Pentium-II. The motherboard uses the Intel BX
chipset (almost without exception). The DPT runs firmware version 7M0.
Another thing that happens to me is that the file-system creation
crashes when using a very large ``disk'' (array) and creating huge (over
4GB) file-systems.
If the above sounds familiar, read on.
Analysis (which was partially funded by some good souls with horrible
problems of this nature) shows the following:
a. The huge file-system newfs crash is probably not directly DPT related;
The DPT controller simply makes it easy to come up with a 20-100GB
``disk''. This is a known (to me, at least) problem in FreeBSD-2.x.y.
It appears as something in the sysinstall code (I admit to have no clue
what/where) assumes that file-system sizes (in bytes) are expressed as
32bit integers. This is obviously not good enough for file-systems
larger than 4GB.
The solution here is to simply avoid creating any file-system ,during
fresh install!) larger than 1-2GB. The problem does not seem to
inflict normal fdisk/disklabel/newfs.
b. Replace firmware 7M0 with 7Li. You can find 7Li in my ftp server:
ftp://simon-shapiro.org/crash/fw/476d07li.fwi. This will improve
things. It appears as if 7M0 is a bit confusable with the data rate
that FreeBSD can send its way. This is less critical with 3.0+CAM, but
very noticeable with 2.2.7.
c. Move the DPT card to another slot. Move the video card to another
slot. If you have multiple DPTs, swap between them. This seems to
cure or greatly improve things. It cam also make things go real bad. I
have a test system (sent to me by a ``customer'') that I can routinely
cause to hang during POST (way before FreeBSD is loaded in any was shape
or form) by simply plugging the DPT to the slot closest to the CPU.
d. Upgrade to 3.0. It seems 2.2.7 does something funny (or does not do
something important?) during shutdown. This is evidenced by the
difference in behavior between power-up and reboot. Pushing the reset
button produces results that are somewhere between power-up and
all-software reboot.
Folks, I am sorry I can only give you work around solutions (and not
perfect ones!) and cannot give you a correction. Be assured I am working
with the factory people to isolate and narrow-down the problem.
BTW, I am not a regular reader of -questions, so please drop me a line if
you think I can help...
Sincerely Yours, Shimon@Simon-Shapiro.ORG
770.265.7340
Simon Shapiro
Unwritten code has no bugs and executes at twice the speed of mouth
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