Progress installing on IBM LS21 "Blade" machine

[Ivan Voras]

Tom Samplonius wrote:

> 
>   The one thing about IBM blades, is that the various controllers for all kinds of IO devices may exist, but are simply not wired.  FreeBSD is quite picky (or stupid) about device probing.  If it finds a device, it basically demands that it works.  It would be great if drivers could simply bail, if the devices were there, but didn't work, rather than just hanging.
> 
>   You can disable the parallel port device from the boot prompt.  The same goes for any other phantom hardware that FreeBSD can't grok.

Well, one of the places where it stuck was after detecting "pci6" or 
something, so there's no guessing what exactly went wrong.

>   The umass device might exist, sometimes.  This might be part of the remote CD and floppy support.  So when you use the remote console to map your local floppy or CD or ISO to the blade, the remote console software makes the device appear as a umass device to the blade.  I bet if you used the remote console, and had it share your local floppy to the device, the FreeBSD install would pass.

I don't have the relevant dmesgs but I think the remote CD was detected 
ok. I thought maybe the "buggy" umass device holds the embedded 
diagnostic utility (like their PC doctor...) or something.