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Date:      Sat, 11 Oct 2008 07:48:17 -0700
From:      Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Gary Jennejohn <gary.jennejohn@freenet.de>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, JoaoBR <joao@matik.com.br>, freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: am2 MBs - 4g + SCSI wipes out root partition
Message-ID:  <20081011144817.GB64861@icarus.home.lan>
In-Reply-To: <20081011164529.198f32c6@ernst.jennejohn.org>
References:  <200810101429.37244.joao@matik.com.br> <20081011113057.7402300c@ernst.jennejohn.org> <20081011101316.GA58119@icarus.home.lan> <20081011164529.198f32c6@ernst.jennejohn.org>

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On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 04:45:29PM +0200, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:13:16 -0700
> Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 11:30:57AM +0200, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> > > On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:29:37 -0300
> > > JoaoBR <joao@matik.com.br> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I tried MBs as Asus, Abit and Gigabyte all same result
> > > > 
> > > > Same hardware with SATA works perfect
> > > > 
> > > > Same hardware with scsi up to 3.5Gigs installed works perfect
> > > > 
> > > > what calls my attention that all this MBs do not have the memroy hole 
> > > > remapping feature so the complete 4gigs are available what normally was not 
> > > > the case with amd64 Mbs for the Athlon 64 CPUs
> > > > 
> > > > some has an opinion if this is a freebsd issue or MB falure or scsi drv 
> > > > problem?
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > It's a driver problem.  If you want to use SCSI then you'll have to limit
> > > memory to 3.5 GB.
> > 
> > What you're saying is that Adaptec and LSI Logic SCSI controllers behave
> > badly (and can cause data loss) on amd64 systems which contain more than
> > 3.5GB of RAM.  This is a very big claim.
> > 
> > Have you talked to Scott Long about this?
> > 
> > Please expand on this, and provide evidence or references.  I need to
> > document this in my Wiki if it is indeed true.
> > 
> 
> See the freebsd-scsi thread with Subject "data corruption with ahc driver
> and 4GB of memory using a FBSD-8 64-bit installation?" from Wed, 30 Jan
> 2008.
> 
> This was for ahc, but the bit-rot which Scott mentions in his reply might
> also apply to the LSI Logic controllers.
> 
> Basically the driver doesn't correctly handle DMA above 4GB.  Since the PCI
> hole gets mapped above 4GB it causes problems.  the (S)ATA drivers don't seem
> to have this problem.

Thank you -- this is the exact information I was looking for.

I will update my Wiki page to reflect this quite major problem.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |




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