Roy C Bixler wrote:
>
> On Fri, 18 Dec 1998, Gualtiero Anselmetti wrote:
> > someone knows if there are some problem installing linux on a HP Netserver LC3
>with onboard aic7880 based SCSI controller ?
>
> I don't know if it's relevant or not, but I've been having some problems
> recently on a Dell Poweredge 2200 with on-board AIC-7880 controller. At
> semi-random times (with low load), I got 'parity error' messages in my
> kernel logs. Sometimes they were followed by SCSI bus resets and/or a
> hard lock-up with a message about 'trying to kill the idle task'. This is
> with recent 2.1.x series kernels and the 5.1.0 and 5.1.2 aic7xxx drivers.
>
> One thing I found is that the aic7xxx driver defaults to 'parity disabled'
> while my SCSI BIOS was set to 'parity enabled'.
Not quite true. The aic7xxx driver reads the SCSI Parity settings from the
SEEPROM and if the SEEPROM isn't found, then it uses the settings found in the
card's registers. The parity item you are talking about is the PCI parity
stuff. The SCSI parity and the PCI parity are two totally different things.
> The boot-up messages say
> nothing about parity settings, so I assume there was a conflict between
> the SCSI controller setting and the driver setting. Due to a comment in
> the aic7xxx.c file about PCI parity check feature being 'dubious at best',
> I elected to disable parity in the SCSI BIOS. Alternatively, I could have
> leff the PCI parity check enabled in the SCSI BIOS and added a
> 'aic7xxx=pci_parity' boot parameter. Anyway, since disabling parity check
> in the SCSI BIOS, I haven't seen any SCSI parity errors. Then again, I
> only made the change 2 days ago. (BTW, I would still appreciate comments
> anyone might have about the merits (or demerits) of SCSI parity checks.)
If you have a SCSI parity problem somewhere, then there is something wrong
that needs to be fixed (and I would leave it enabled). That could be a driver
problem, a cabling problem, or something else. PCI parity is a different
issue. Certain motherboards work fine with PCI parity enabled, while others
will never generate and error regardless of settings (aka, the PCI parity
checking stuff on the motherboard chipset is disabled so regardless of what I
set on the card it does nothing), and on other motherboards you can't get the
PCI parity errors to stop no matter what you do unless you just disable them
entirely. That's why it defaults to off.
--
Doug Ledford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Opinions expressed are my own, but
they should be everybody's.
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