*BSD News Article 51669


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From: se@MI.Uni-Koeln.DE (Stefan Esser)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Ultimate BSD PC Hardware Setup
Date: 19 Sep 1995 09:41:57 GMT
Organization: Institute for Mathematics, University of Cologne, Germany
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <43m395$r2t@news.rrz.uni-koeln.de>
References: <43df2f$id@future.internexus.net> <MICHAELV.95Sep18161217@MindBender.HeadCandy.com> <43l8mg$sce@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sysiphos.mi.uni-koeln.de
To: ericvb@Sun.COM (Eric van Bezooijen)
Bcc: se

In article <43l8mg$sce@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM>, ericvb@Sun.COM (Eric van Bezooijen) writes:
|> There was a bug in FreeBSD 2.0 where an NCR card combined with a Grand Prix
|> drive wouldn't work.  I got a patch for it (which should make it into 2.1),
|> but I still couldn't get the 4.3 Gb drive to act as a root partition, so

Would it be possible to test with a current kernel ?

I could send patches to just update the NCR driver to the latest
revision, leaving the rest of your system at the release level of
your choice ...

|> I put root on my other 1.0 Gb drive.  If NetBSD and FreeBSD code are related,
|> perhaps NetBSD would have the same problem...

There was a one line change necessary to support the Grand-Prix,
and that went into FreeBSD just after 2.0.5R had been released.

Then there was another unrelated problem, which was caused by the 
code executed by the NCR growing beyond one memory page. This was
no problem, unless some other driver had allocated and released 
several pages, since the NCR needs physically contiguous pages.

This could make the mount of the root file system fail.

Both problems have been corrected in FreeBSD-current, and if any
drive (be it disk, CDROM or tape) still doesn't work correctly, I 
really would like to know about it ...

Regards, Stefan
-- 
 Stefan Esser, Zentrum fuer Paralleles Rechnen		Tel:	+49 221 4706021
 Universitaet zu Koeln, Weyertal 80, 50931 Koeln	FAX:	+49 221 4705160
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 http://www.zpr.uni-koeln.de/staff/esser/esser.html	  <se@ZPR.Uni-Koeln.DE>