From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 26 16:42:31 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id QAA15564 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Mon, 26 Oct 1998 16:42:31 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from nomis.simon-shapiro.org (nomis.simon-shapiro.org [209.86.126.163]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA15546 for ; Mon, 26 Oct 1998 16:42:26 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from shimon@simon-shapiro.org) Received: (qmail 10872 invoked by uid 1000); 27 Oct 1998 01:45:44 -0000 Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.3 [p0] on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 20:45:44 -0400 (EST) X-Face: (&r=uR0&yvh>h^ZL4"-TH61PD}/|Y'~58Z# Gz&BK'&uLAf:2wLb~L7YcWfau{;N(#LR2)\i.l8'ZqVhv~$rNx$]Om6Sv36S'\~5m/U'"i/L)&t$R0&?,)tm0l5xZ!\hZU^yMyCdt!KTcQ376cCkQ^Q_n.GH;Dd-q+ O51^+.K-1Kq?WsP9;cw-Ki+b.iY-5@3!YB5{I$h;E][Xlg*sPO61^5=:5k)JdGet,M|$"lq!1!j_>? $0Yc? Reply-To: shimon@simon-shapiro.org Organization: The Simon Shapiro Foundation From: Simon Shapiro To: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: DPT Hangs at Boot (Especially with 2.2.7) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [ 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message