Any progress? Any hope? Anyone listening?

[Robert G. Brown]

Dear Doug et. al.,

I've verified, unfortunately, that a Dell Poweredge 2300 with onboard
7890 exhibits the following behavior:

a) If directly booted with aic7xxx 5.1.0pre7 and 2.0.35 (SMP), it gets
through the timeout reset and enters the Parity Error loop during the
device probe.  Sometimes it will return the attached device before
spinning out forever.

b) If FIRST booted from pre-installed WinNT (through its aic7xxx
initialization) and THEN warm booted into linux with the same kernel
used in a), it does the timeout reset, finds both attached devices (or
all three) and proceeds to function normally (permitting full
installation of linux on the disk and numerous -- warm -- reboots) until:

c) The first time I power it down.  When powered up, it recapitulates
pattern a) but this time I HAVE no WinNT on the hard disk to reset the
controller and cannot recover the system.  Or rather, one boot in ten or
thirty it appears to recover briefly but I cannot tell why.

The pattern appears to be stable although my statistics on c) are still
weak because I don't really want to trash my operating cluster to get
better ones.  Next major power out around here and I'm toast, though.

STRONGLY appears like there is some bug in the initialization sequence
that WinNT gets right and the linux aic7xxx gets wrong.

Is there hope for me here?  Is there anything I can do to help solve the
problem?  I have precisely one system left with WinNT preinstalled on
the hard drive to play with, so if any fixes come down I can test them.
I also have three boxes in the "dead" state -- I can probably run them
totally diskless (no aic7xxx driver at all) but obviously this wastes
some very expensive and actually fairly nice hardware...


   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu




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