Tyan k8sr lockups

[Vivek Khera]

On Mar 29, 2005, at 7:39 PM, Sten Spans wrote:

> There was an amr panic related to the management ioctls
> which was fixed and backported to RELENG_5. You should have
> this fix. amr controllers a supported quite well on freebsd
> thanks to Scott's great work.
>

Yes, that was part of the reason I cvsup'd again last week... to ensure 
I had the latest fixes to the amr driver.

> The only way to get closer to solving these problems
> is to dig and try to narrow it down:
>
> - Have you tried running with debugging ?

any more than having the kernel debugger installed?  When the box 
locked up I couldn't even drop into the kernel debugger from the serial 
console. neither the BREAK signal nor the alt key sequence invoked it.

>
> - Have you tried using other network cards ?
>   ( yeah that sucks I know )

Nope.  Machine is brand spanking new.  Was in service a whole of 5 days 
before it locked up.  The twin of this machine also has issues with the 
BIOS reporting "memory size changed" while the machine is running... so 
I'm a bit concerned that there is some generic problem with the K8SR 
and a megaraid controller.  But that one never had any complaints about 
the ethernet, and the memory size error persisted across two 
motherboards.

I have yet to try the other ethernet port on this box as well.

>
> - Are you absolutely sure that all the disks are working ?
>   ( there have been reports of amr cards acting strange with
>     silently failing disks )

The megaraid bios showed all disks as active.  How would one tell if 
you had a silently failing disk? :-(

> - Have you got the ufs fixes recently backported to releng_5 ?

If it was prior to March 22, then yes I have them.  Where in cvsweb 
might I look to test?

> These are the first I can think of. RELENG_5 seems to be
> a bit of a moving target with some quite critical fixes
> going in ( which is good offcourse :).

Yes, it is good.... until you can't figure out if it is your hardware 
or software flaking out on ya...

Thanks so much for responding.

For price-no-object, which vendor would you choose for an AMD system 
today?  Same question if price is somewhat of a concern.  Thanks.