FreeBSD 7.0 SATA Controller

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 08:31:35PM +0100, Dieter wrote:
> > Finally, the behaviour you're experiencing with your machine (re: the
> > progress bar stalling 2/3rds of the way through) sounds almost as if the
> > hard disks aren't spinning up quick enough after a soft reset from
> > within FreeBSD or Linux 2.4.
> 
> The disks should have spun up long before a reset gets issued.

Not necessarily.  It ultimately depends on what the system is engineered
to do during a soft reboot.  The disks themselves may be powering down
briefly, may take a long time to initialise, or maybe there's a bug in
the drive firmware.

My personal guess is that it's a BIOS bug.

> > > for some reason i cannot mount any sort of media in freebsd 7 systems.
> > > the computer handles the booting of the cd's fine but freebsd cannot
> > > for some reason handle the mounting of disks.
> 
> It is the firmware (and maybe a bootstrap) that boots a CD.
> Once control is handed over to the FreeBSD kernel, then the
> kernel has to be able to talk to the disks.  It is the FreeBSD 7
> kernel that is having the problem.

Again, not necessarily.  I think I've provided enough evidence of where
BIOS settings can affect FreeBSD's behaviour when it comes to disk
controllers.  My RAID question was one such example.

> > > the next step im going
> > > to take is installing 6.2 and remaking the world but adding device
> > > aptic to the kernel.
> > 
> > I think you mean "device apic" to the kernel?
> 
> No, it is "device aptic".  It was in 6 but removed from 7.  I had to add
> aptic to get my nforce4-ultra board to boot 7.  Given that 6 runs on
> Shaun's machine and 7 doesn't, adding aptic is a useful thing to try.

There is no "aptic" device on RELENG_6.  I just did a grep -ri "aptic"
/usr/src on our RELENG_6 box and found absolutely no trace of said
device.  You are thinking of "apic".

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |