More about the 9500S-4 issues with the MoBo and FreeBSD...

[ray at redshift.com]

At 01:25 PM 11/29/2005 +0100, Olaf Greve wrote:
| Hi,
| 
| A little bit of further information (which I just checked on the machine 
| when I went home for lunch):
| 
| I identified the Texas Instruments device. It's not the memory (which of 
| course makes sense), but rather, it seems to be a FireWire controller.
| (TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link) (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) ).
| 
| When considering the following FreeBSD output:
| twa0: <3ware 9000 series storage controller> port 0xa000-0xa0ff mem 
| 0xd8005000-0xd80050ff, 0xd2000000-0xd27fffff irq 16 at device 6.0 on pci5
| 
| And:
| fwohci0: <Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A> irq 16 at device 11.0 on pci5
| 
| Could this perhaps be the culprit???
| 
| I don't recall having seen any way to disable FireWire on the MoBo, but 
| perhaps there is...
| 
| Also, I checked the chipset: it's nForce 4.
| 
| Hopefully this additional information contributes to identifying the 
| clashing devices...
| 
| Cheers,
| Olafo

Olafo,

 Did you remove all the cards and clear the CMOS on the motherboard yet?  There
should be a jumper you short.  That will reset all the IRQ stuff.  Then disable
everything in the BIOS you can.  Then plug in the 3ware card.  That might shift
around the IRQ's.  You almost might change the setting about "Plug and Play OS"
to see if that has any impact.

  You might also set an IRQ in the BIOS as reserved and see if that makes any
difference.  I don't know the exact impact of that as it relates to the
motherboard, but it's possible that will keep motherboard devices (such as the
fire wire stuff) off those channels and allow them to be used by cards?  I don't
know, but it's worth trying.

  I know you aren't going to like to hear this, but perhaps a motherboard brand
chance is in order?  In the long run, it may save time/money.  In my experience,
a big part of building a good, stable server is to buy the right hardware out of
the gate.  For AMD CPU's, I only use Tyan here.  I run the Tyan boards on my
servers and Workstation and they are some of the most stable boards I have ever
used.

Ray