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Date:      Tue, 04 Mar 2003 18:05:55 -0700
From:      Scott Long <scott_long@btc.adaptec.com>
To:        John Wilson <jmw_ymail@yahoo.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: A few 5.0-Release questions...
Message-ID:  <3E654D73.8030308@btc.adaptec.com>
In-Reply-To: <20030304230320.61704.qmail@web20704.mail.yahoo.com>
References:  <20030304230320.61704.qmail@web20704.mail.yahoo.com>

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John Wilson wrote:
> Good day,
> 
> After spending quite some time trying to get
> 5.0-RELEASE installed on a Dell PowerEdge machine, it
> seems that all is now working quite well.  Being that
> these machines are somewhat common, I'll share what
> was halting my installation.
> 

What model?  There are quite a few PowerEdges out there.  I
installed 5.0 (actually, I built the official 5.0 release)
on a PowerEdge.

> These machines come with integrated video, an ATI
> RageXL, which is rather useless for anything other
> than console mode. I installed an ATI All- In-Wonder
> VE so that I could get somewhat decent performance out
> of X. The problem manifested when the kernel probed
> the machines hardware, causing an "NMI ISA 30, EISA
> ff", and locking up the machine solid. After I began
> pulling memory and expansion cards from the system,
> the error went away when I removed the ATI AIW card. I
> reinstalled the card and attempted to find how to
> correct this. My only solution to this issue was to
> interrupt the boot process and use the following
> command:
> 
> set hw.pci.enable_io_modes = 0
> 
> This prevented any further halts.

As a wild guess, what happenes when you remove the EISA
device from the kernel?

> 
> My first question is as follows: is /boot/device.hints
> the most proper place to stick this? Also, are there
> any other possible solutions to this issue?
> 

/boot/loader.conf is the best place for this.

> My main drives are SCSI, and I have one CD-RW and one
> DVD-R on the secondary IDE controller. The kernel
> detects the drives just fine, but defaults them both
> down to PIO4. The drives are fully UDMA2 capable. I am
> able to set the drives to use UDMA2 via atacontrol
> without issue.  However, how would one make this more
> permanent, such that I wouldn't have to use atacontrol
> everytime I boot the machine?

There have been problems in the past with ATAPI/IDE drives
that claim DMA capabilities but instead corrupt data and/or
cause panics.  Forcing everything to PIO is the easiest way
to achieve maximum compatibility.  The ata manual page
describes what to put into /boot/loader.conf to force them
back using DMA.

> 
> Back to the topic of video; is there _any_ way to
> permanently disable, or at least prevent FreeBSD from
> detecting the integrated video on the motherboard?
> There is nothing in the machines BIOS that would allow
> this. This would just be "nice" to do, as X works just
> fine, but it still sticks an entry into the
> XFree86Config file for the integrated chip.

Does the motherboard have a jumper that will disable it?

> 
> And finally...
> 
> Where can one obtain a complete list of allowed hints
> for use in /boot/device.hints? I tried searching
> around the FBSD site as well as the handbook and found
> no listing, other than a line here and a line there.

This has been desired for a long time, yes.  There have
been periodic pushes to do this, but they quickly loose
steam or become outdated.

Scott


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