Intel PR440FX "Providence" with Debian 2.x

[Mike Bilow]

I have previously communicated with some of you individually regarding a
problem with an Intel PR440FX "Providence" motherboard.  This is a
dual-PentiumPro board with built-in AIC-7880P SCSI controller and Intel
EtherExpress Pro100 network interface.  Here is how we resolved it:

First, for Debian, Greg Norris' custom boot floppies based on the 5.1.11 driver
integrated with the 2.0.36 kernel must be used.  The Debian 2.0 ("hamm") boot
set did not work for us, but the Debian 2.1 ("slink") boot set did work.  The
main difference, as I understand it, is that all of the other SCSI drivers were
removed in the later boot set in order to minimize the change of conflicts
between drivers.  My personal suspicion, based upon a cryptic error message at
the point of failure, is that the WD-7000 driver may be somehow conflicting.

Second, the default configuration for the board is to share IRQ11 between both
the SCSI controller and the Ethernet interface.  There is no direct way to
override this, but we found that making IRQ11 unavailable in BIOS would cause
the devices to split up, one going to IRQ10 and the other to IRQ15 (after
disabling the secondary IDE controller.)  This change also corrected several
spontaneous hang problems that we had been trying to track down.
 
-- Mike




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