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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!inquo!in-news.erinet.com!bug.rahul.net!rahul.net!a2i!samba.rahul.net!rahul.net!a2i!olivea!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.sprintlink.net!new-news.sprintlink.net!malgudi.oar.net!hyperion.wright.edu!echoes.wittenberg.edu!bob.wittenberg.edu!mandrews From: mandrews@bob.Wittenberg.EDU (Mike Andrews) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Adaptec 2940UW lockup problem Date: 25 Apr 96 12:22:24 GMT Organization: Wittenberg University, Springfield OH Lines: 85 Message-ID: <mandrews.830434944@bob.wittenberg.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bob.wittenberg.edu X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #8 (NOV) I'm trying to get yet another FreeBSD box up and running, and I'm having fits with the SCSI subsystem. The hardware looks like: Pentium/133, OPTI Viper PCI chipset, 32MB RAM Western Digital 1.6GB EIDE drive (128MB swap, remainder mounted on /) Adaptec 2940 Ultra Wide SCSI controller two Seagate Hawk 2GB narrow SCSI drives (mounted on /home and /usr/local) Toshiba 3701 SCSI CDROM Exabyte 8505XL 8mm SCSI tape drive STB Horizon 64 PCI video 3com 3c509 ISA ethernet Note that the controller is wide, but all the current devices are narrow... The problem is that the machine siezes up tight during some SCSI activity. No kernel message/panic, nada, just frozen system, keyboard, only way out is the Reset button. Out of the box, I couldn't even complete a newfs on a disk without it crashing. I went into the SCSI BIOS and disabled the >1GB translation, and things improved greatly, but not completely. Now it only seems to die if I hammer both SCSI disks concurrently -- doing something like # mkdir /home/junk # cd /usr/local # tar cf - * | (cd /home/junk; tar xpf -) will kill it consistently. But if I do it from the CDROM or from the IDE disk, or even do rm -rf on both SCSI drives, no problem. Running about 5 gcc's in parallel won't kill it either, but I know that's hammering the CPU more than the disk. First I tried swapping the 3c509 out for a 3c503 (thinking the 509's buggy Plug and Pray might be confusing it), and that didn't help. Disconnecting the external CDROM and tape drive don't help either. BUT, I did try my 2940 from home (no U, no W, just a plain jane 2940), and I was unable to get the machine to crash with it. Plugged the 2940UW back in and I can crash it within two minutes using tar. Thinking "ah, it's a driver bug affecting just the newer Ultra series cards", I went out and FTP'ed 2.2-960323-SNAP, installed it on top of 2.1.0-RELEASE, recompiled a new kernel, then tried the 2940UW and it STILL dies! So, if anyone has any suggestions on how to proceed from here to save me some trial and error time, I would LOVE to hear about it before I totally lose it ;-) I've installed several FreeBSD systems before with none of this kind of trouble, though they were mostly 486's with BusLogic BT445 VLB SCSI boards.... Meanwhile, here's what I suspect, and I could really use some supportive thinking on this: First suspect is SCSI BIOS settings. How much of this really affects FreeBSD? I would think FreeBSD would ignore the whole thing, but after changing that >1GB translation feature made such a big difference, I'm not so sure anymore. How much difference would playing with, say, the transfer rate setting in the BIOS help? I just tried cranking it down from 20mb/s to 10mb/s, since the drives are all narrow anyway, but I would think that would get negotiated a little more automatically. So far it hasn't died since I did that, but I haven't tried very hard yet. :) I did notice FreeBSD's idea of geometry translation is different from the BusLogic cards in our 486's, with the exact same hard drive. (We have about twelve of the 2 gig Seagate Hawk drives floating around.) On a 486, disklabel says 2048 cylinders, 64 heads, 32 sectors (=4196320 sectors). On this P133, it's 260 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors (=4192902 sectors).... but this was disklabeled before disabling >1GB translation. The drive's actual geometry is 3992 cylinders, 9 heads, 117 sectors. Somehow I doubt relabeling would help though, since it really goes by sector number internally, right? Next suspect is the kernel driver for the 2940 is flaky with the new Ultra cards. Any input here? Failing that, maybe I have to look at bizarre PCI problems. I've heard of horror stories getting ATI mach64 cards and Adaptec 2940UW's to be happy with each other (usually solved by throwing the ATI out in favor of a Matrox Millenium). Maybe the STB card has a similar problem.... or maybe the OPTI Viper chipset just sucks.... I don't know. -- -- Mike Andrews - mandrews@wittenberg.edu - mandrews@termfrost.org (NeXT) -- Programmer/Analyst, webmaster/netnews guy, Wittenberg Univ, Springfield OH -- http://www.termfrost.org/~mandrews/ "Don't get even, get odd..."