Upgrade from 8.2-STABLE to 9.0-RELEASE wedges on SuperMicro H8DGiF-based system

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 11:25:45AM -0800, Freddie Cash wrote:
> 2012/1/9 Daniel Kalchev <daniel at digsys.bg>:
> > On Jan 9, 2012, at 8:03 PM, Freddie Cash wrote:
> >
> >> Small correction: ??these are AMD Opteron 6218 CPUs, not 2218.
> >>
> >>> Hardware (alphadrive):
> >>> ??Chenbro 5U rackmount chassis with 24 hot-swap drive bays
> >>> ??SuperMicro H8DGi-F motherboard
> >>> ??AMD Opteron 6218 CPU (8-cores at 2.0 GHz)
> >
> > You meant Opteron 6128 perhaps?
> 
> Yes, 6128.  Aren't typos fun?  :)
> 
> > This looks weird coincidence indeed and considering the comments so far I too would question ACPI (BIOS revision, settings etc) and the possibility for some hardware going bad.
> 
> I've upgraded the BIOS to v2.00 same as betadrive.  However, using the
> exact same BIOS settings as betadrive causes the SATA controllers and
> onboard igb(4) interfaces to not be detected.  At all.  Nothing in
> dmesg or pciconf.  Resetting BIOS settings to "Failsafe settings"
> shows the SATA controllers and onboard NICs.  Now the fun begins to
> figure out which setting in the BIOS is causing this.
> 
> I'm starting to lean toward a hardware issue with either the CPU
> (since most of the chipset is in the CPU nowadays) or the motherboard.
>
> Have a few more tests to run to try and narrow things down.

Probably goes without saying, but: I would report *all* of this
behaviour to Supermicro Technical Support.  What you could be
experiencing is simply a BIOS bug, they should be able to help if you
figure out what particular setting causes the problem.

For an example of just how nonsensical some BIOS behaviours are, here's
a bug report I submit to Shuttle regarding how disabling the Firewire
controller on their system resulted in a box that wouldn't even start
up:

http://koitsu.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/shuttle-sg45h7-firewire-bug-in-bios-sg45u10o/

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