Re: FreeBSD 7.0 SATA Controller
On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 11:03:15PM -0400, Shaun Sabo wrote: line in a bsd system. i had the problem where it would only boot 2/3 of the way into the bios once before when i used debian, it was because debian was What do you mean by 2/3 of the way into the BIOS? Are you saying it only completes 2/3 of the POST? If so, it's not even getting to the point where it boots the CD. Or are you talking about 2/3 of the way through the kernel probes? If so, that's a problem I've seen a lot with Dells. In fact on a newly-purchased Dell 755, I couldn't get halfway through the POST about 75% of the time. Clearing the CMOS/RTC helped, and still about half of the time I boot into the FreeBSD kernel (7-STABLE) it would hang for no reason. Hitting the power button triggered an ACPI event to properly shutdown and restart, but it's damn annoying. the bios just to make sure that nothing is wrong with them. And also i tried both the 7.0-RELEASE and 7-STABLE livefs disks and both of them cannot mount the livefs image. What do you mean by mointing the livefs image? Are you booting a different CD? It was recommended that you burn the livefs CD and then boot *it*. That should also take care of the mounting. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD 7.0 SATA Controller
On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 10:09:20PM -0400, Shaun Sabo wrote: What happens with the bios is i start with the machine off. turn it on. boot into any freebsd 7 based disk. ill exit the disk and tell it to reboot the system. the system shuts down and it goes to turn on again. when you turn on a dell computer a progress bar will fill and then it will go to the boot loader/active partition, i believe that it initializes the bios settings. what happens after i reboot out of the freebsd 7 based disks is the progress bar hangs at about 2/3 full. i can boot into a cd or operating system fine if i turn the machine completely off but something isnt re-settting when i reboot out of freebsd. this used to happen when i tried using debian linux This sounds like a BIOS bug. FreeBSD has no control over what happens while the BIOS is doing a cold restart, until the initial boot record is read and then executed. AFAIR, there are two ways FreeBSD initiates a warm restart.. via a BIOS call or using ACPI. In either case, the hardware and the firmware controlling said hardware (which we call the BIOS) is responsible for ensuring everything gets initialized correctly. There's not much that FreeBSD can do, although you could try with and without ACPI and see if one works better than another. This situation reinforces my belief that Dell has problems with their BIOS firmware. I've yet to see a Dell behave as well as any system I've built myself. as for the livefs. i downloaded both the 7-STABLE and 7.0-RELEASE livefs cds. when i boot them up it gets to the sysinstall program like all of the other disks do. Then I don't believe you are using the livecd. If you're hitting sysinstall, you must be using the bootonly, disc1, or fixit CDs. to use the livefs functions you have to go into fixit and then choose the CD/DVD option. what this does is it mounts the filesystem kept on the cd so that you can switch to the virtual terminal 4 (alt+f4) and use the system as a recovery disk or for dmesg and such. the error i get is could not mount the livefs cd. try again? Then that rules out fixit CD. I thought even the bootonly disk1 images had a minimal (i.e. useless) image and that this step is always successful. for some reason i cannot mount any sort of media in freebsd 7 systems. I assume you mean from a freebsd 7.0-RELEASE CD image? Otherwise that's a pretty bold statement. If true, then this may be a driver issue that I've never heard of. the computer handles the booting of the cd's fine but freebsd cannot for some reason handle the mounting of disks. What is the name of the image you downloaded, perhaps the full URL you grabbed it from? It was suggested that you try a post-7.0 livecd. I've had very good luck with these, both using and creating them. the next step im going to take is installing 6.2 and remaking the world but adding device aptic to the kernel. What is this aptic device? I can't seem to find it on any 6.x or 7.x system. Perhaps it is a typo? Please explain. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD 7.0 SATA Controller
On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 11:53:04PM -0400, Shaun Sabo wrote: the livefs cds do not drop you into a shell. they drop you into the same screen you see when you insert an installation cd. try it on qemu or another virtualization program or even boot one up if you have a spare cd rom. in order to access the livefs shell you need to navigate to the fixit menu and then go to the livefs CD/DVD option. Please explain where you obtained said livefs CD. Every livefs CD I've tried (in qemu) has dropped me to a shell. Every fixit CD I've tried brings me to sysinstall and from there I drop to the shell after navigating the menus. as for the apic vc acpi that was a typo due to exhaustion, sorry bout that. Sure, but which one do you mean? I assume you mean booting with or without ACPI, which is an option in the boot loader. motherboard so i couldnt even boot the debian installer cd. i also tried booting the freebsd installer disks without apic but the same problem occurs so i dont think its hanging because of the power managment. ACPI isn't just power management-- it's advanced _configuration_ and power interface. My understanding is that if present, FreeBSD talks to the ACPI on the BIOS to allocate IRQs and other resources. There have been bugs in the past when dealing with ACPI which caused the FreeBSD devs to include a boot option to disable it. If your system breaks w/o ACPI, then there's certainly a BIOS firmware problem. Have you tried the following test? Cold boot (from power off) to FreeBSD CD, disable ACPI from the menu, boot the kernel, then do a warm reboot and see if the problem exists. My sense is that if your first attempt from a cold start has ACPI enabled, the problem will persist for every subsequent warm reboot. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nvidia nforce 630a
On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 08:47:51AM +1100, Dean Hamstead wrote: running 6.2-RELEASE for amd64, where yours says atapci2: nVidia nForce MCP51 SATA300 controller mine says atapci2: GENERIC ATA CONTROLLER Probably your chipset wasn't available when 6.2 was released. If you upgrade to 6.3-prerelease it may be detected. so im wondering if there is an installable module that will bring my harddisks up from ata33 speeds to sata300. similarly, i compiled and installed the nfe drivers for the realtek gigabit nic. Everything is controlled by the ata(4) module. What does the output of atacontrol mode ad0 say? (replace ad0 with the device name of your hard drive). Perhaps it detects SATA300 mode. As someone else suggested, please post the output of pciconf -lv. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Promise TX2300 array not detected.
On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 10:04:55PM -0400, Matthew Hagerty wrote: Thanks for the info. You make some good points for using a software RAID, I'll have to do a little more research and run some simulated failures so I know how to deal with the real failure when it comes. In some cases, hardware RAID is necessary, but not just because marketing says you need it. I am installing 6.2, I was referencing that link mostly for the errors which are exactly what I was getting. That probably was a little confusing since that link was referencing 6.1. Sorry. I found a thread that said it was not known if the problem could be solved in the drivers, and was due to aggressive timing on the card and that Promise was known for such things. After reading that I tried the card in a different computer and the errors went away. Does not leave me with a lot of confidence. I've witnessed the Promise card timing issues myself.. it sure does matter what motherboard it's in, and some of your BIOS settings can affect it. But I've also seen that the cards behave better in 6.2 in general. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Promise TX2300 array not detected.
On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 12:24:16PM -0400, Matthew Hagerty wrote: After the second install, everything came up on the ar0 array and worked fine. I ran some basic stress tests and was getting 16MB/sec write speed and 46MB/sec read. So, I'm off to find a real SATA2 PCI RAID card... :-( real RAID cards cost an order of magnitude more than fakeraid cards. What is your reason behind getting real hardware RAID? From my own personal testing and online research, software RAID outperforms most real RAID cards. So if your reasoning is based on performance gain, you may be in for another shock. If your reasoning is so that you can multi-boot different OSes without requiring drivers, then you may have a compelling reason to go to hardware RAID. However, most cases fakeraid is good enough. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Promise TX2300 array not detected.
On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 03:03:18PM -0400, Matthew Hagerty wrote: My reasoning for a hardware RAID is so I can set it and forget it. If a drive fails (I'm setting up a mirror), I want to be able to just swap the drive and carry on without worrying about having to do something at the BIOS or OS level (controller should rebuild the mirror). Performance in I know of no RAID cards that don't require you to do something at the BIOS level.. on every card I've seen, if you swap a drive you must go into the BIOS and tell the RAID card to reconfigure the new drive. Even on cards which have hot spares, if you swap the drive you need to tell it about the new disk. And with real RAID, how do you know if the RAID is having problems? I haven't seen good solutions (doesn't mean they don't exist) that didn't require OS-level drivers and at least some OS-level interaction. But with software RAID I can write my own shell scripts that detect unplugged drives and use S.M.A.R.T. tools to monitor drive health. Also, if you feel safer about somebody's random RAID card, how do you know there isn't a firmware bug? At least with software RAID, the software is likely public and most bugs have been worked out, or you have some control over the operation. Unless the RAID card comes with a warranty to protect your data at all costs (i.e. they will pay you the value of your data if anything is lost), you're taking a gamble. my case is tertiary to reliability and stability. The TX2300 might have been the wrong choice, but you would not have known from reading the marketing material... Marketing also tells me that my 500 GB drive has 500 GB of storage space, when really it has 500 billion bytes... All manufacturers are guilty of using buzzwords to sell their products. The TX2300 *is* a RAID card after all, but does it require OS support? The easy trick to distinguish between fakeraid and real is whether they list Supported operating systems or package a driver CD. If it doesn't require OS support, why are they giving you OS drivers? The TX2300 was also blowing errors taskqueue timeout errors (http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org/msg01541.html) Looks like that was in 6.1. 6.2 (-stable) at least doesn't have nearly as many of these issues. In fact I haven't seen one crop up since I upgraded a few months ago. on the first machine I had it in, so now I'm a little skeptical about using the card. Try it out and see if you have the same problems. Perhaps it is fixed in 6.2. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Recommended SATA controllers
On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 09:36:31AM +0100, vladimir konrad wrote: As far as the Sil3112 chips go, I'm using them everywhere and they work quite well. Sometimes less is more. are you sure that they are not SiI 3114 ? i had similar discussion on this list a while ago and 3114 was said to be the good one and the 3112 the bad one. Yup. Just checked the hotstamp on the chip: 3112. Is it possible that some boards which used the 3112 chip were made and that those manufacturing problems have been since fixed? -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Recommended SATA controllers
On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 10:28:49PM +0200, Ben Stuyts wrote: I'd vote against a TX2 or SIL3112 based solution on FreeBSD-6: TX2: I can't get my system to boot with the TX2plus card, as BTX crashes. (Reported here, but unfortunately no solution found.) SIL3112: My mainboard (GA-8KNXP) has an onboard SIL3112 controller, and it is useless. It locks up randomly. I recommend almost the opposite-- the Promise TX4 cards seem pretty nice, and under moderate loads I don't see any problems. However, I still haven't located the issue with dropped drives being able to be reprobed. As far as the Sil3112 chips go, I'm using them everywhere and they work quite well. Sometimes less is more. I suspect those random lockups are related to the mainboard and not the chip itself, but others have reported problems with these chips-- I have yet to witness any of the reported problems. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
broken USB in 5.5-stable
Hello. I freshly upgraded a 5.1+ i386 box to the latest 5.5-stable. For some reason, I can't get it to recognize any USB devices (I've only tried mice, a scanner, and a printer). I know usbd is running: # ps axww | grep usbd 414 ?? Ss 0:00:00 /usr/sbin/usbd At first I thought maybe my mouse was broken, so I booted to my old 5.1 drive, works like a charm. Maybe USB wasn't being correctly reset, but it still doesn't work after a cold restart. I tried running usbd -dv and nothing is output as I plug in or unplug any device. One time after warm booting into 5.5 from 5.1, the already-plugged-in mouse was recognized on boot but subsequent unplugs and replugs went unnoticed. Any suggestions? I plan on trying all the 5.x series until I can nail down where it breaks, but I have limited physical access to the machine. Below is my dmesg. The board is an Asus A7N8X-E (nForce2) and I have another almost identical one at home running 5.4 whose USB works like a charm. -- Rick C. Petty Copyright (c) 1992-2006 The FreeBSD Project. Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. FreeBSD 5.5-STABLE #2: Fri Dec 22 01:12:01 CST 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC Timecounter i8254 frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0 CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) (1730.72-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = AuthenticAMD Id = 0x6a0 Stepping = 0 Features=0x383fbffFPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR,SSE AMD Features=0xc040AMIE,DSP,3DNow! real memory = 1610547200 (1535 MB) avail memory = 1568509952 (1495 MB) mptable_probe: Unable to map end of MP Config Table ACPI APIC Table: Nvidia AWRDACPI ioapic0 Version 1.1 irqs 0-23 on motherboard npx0: math processor on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface acpi0: Nvidia AWRDACPI on motherboard acpi0: Power Button (fixed) Timecounter ACPI-fast frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000 acpi_timer0: 24-bit timer at 3.579545MHz port 0x4008-0x400b on acpi0 cpu0: ACPI CPU on acpi0 acpi_button0: Power Button on acpi0 pcib0: ACPI Host-PCI bridge port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0 pci0: ACPI PCI bus on pcib0 agp0: NVIDIA nForce2 AGP Controller mem 0xc000-0xcfff at device 0.0 on pci0 pci0: memory, RAM at device 0.1 (no driver attached) pci0: memory, RAM at device 0.2 (no driver attached) pci0: memory, RAM at device 0.3 (no driver attached) pci0: memory, RAM at device 0.4 (no driver attached) pci0: memory, RAM at device 0.5 (no driver attached) isab0: PCI-ISA bridge at device 1.0 on pci0 isa0: ISA bus on isab0 pci0: serial bus, SMBus at device 1.1 (no driver attached) ohci0: OHCI (generic) USB controller mem 0xdd08-0xdd080fff irq 22 at device 2.0 on pci0 usb0: OHCI version 1.0, legacy support usb0: SMM does not respond, resetting usb0: OHCI (generic) USB controller on ohci0 usb0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0: nVidia OHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub0: 3 ports with 3 removable, self powered ohci1: OHCI (generic) USB controller mem 0xdd083000-0xdd083fff at device 2.1 on pci0 usb1: OHCI version 1.0, legacy support usb1: SMM does not respond, resetting usb1: OHCI (generic) USB controller on ohci1 usb1: USB revision 1.0 uhub1: nVidia OHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub1: 3 ports with 3 removable, self powered pci0: serial bus, USB at device 2.2 (no driver attached) pci0: network, ethernet at device 4.0 (no driver attached) pci0: multimedia, audio at device 5.0 (no driver attached) pci0: multimedia, audio at device 6.0 (no driver attached) pcib1: ACPI PCI-PCI bridge at device 8.0 on pci0 pci1: ACPI PCI bus on pcib1 pci1: display, VGA at device 6.0 (no driver attached) rl0: RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX port 0x9000-0x90ff mem 0xda00-0xdaff irq 19 at device 7.0 on pci1 miibus0: MII bus on rl0 rlphy0: RealTek internal media interface on miibus0 rlphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto rl0: Ethernet address: 00:48:54:84:17:1d ahc0: Adaptec 2940 SCSI adapter port 0x9400-0x94ff mem 0xda001000-0xda001fff irq 17 at device 9.0 on pci1 aic7870: Single Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 16/253 SCBs atapci0: nVidia nForce2 UDMA133 controller port 0xf000-0xf00f,0x376,0x170-0x177,0x3f6,0x1f0-0x1f7 at device 9.0 on pci0 ata0: channel #0 on atapci0 ata1: channel #1 on atapci0 pcib2: ACPI PCI-PCI bridge at device 12.0 on pci0 pci2: ACPI PCI bus on pcib2 xl0: 3Com 3c920B-EMB Integrated Fast Etherlink XL port 0xa000-0xa07f mem 0xdc00-0xdc7f irq 20 at device 1.0 on pci2 miibus1: MII bus on xl0 acphy0: AC101L 10/100 media interface on miibus1 acphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto xl0: Ethernet address: 00:26:54:0e:9e:8f fwohci0: 1394 Open Host Controller Interface mem 0xdd087000-0xdd08703f,0xdd086000-0xdd0867ff irq 20 at device 13.0 on pci0 fwohci0: OHCI version 1.10 (ROM=0) fwohci0: No. of Isochronous channels is 4. fwohci0: EUI64 00:e0:18:00:00:24:35:8b fwohci0: Phy 1394a available S400, 2 ports
Re: reduce interrupt rate for CD/DVD drive(r)
On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 04:37:29PM -0700, Jin Guojun [VFFS] wrote: I have difficulty to get CD/DVD write speed above 1.6MB/s (10x for CD, or 1.1x for DVD). The problem seems to be the interrupt rate is high (70-80% of CPU) for CD/DVD drive(r). What's the value of the hw.ata.atapi_dma sysctl? -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: building an old-hardware server
On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 01:03:15PM +0300, ANdrei wrote: 1 gig hard disks are a waste of time, space and money. How about 2gig ones? ;) I actually don't pay anything for these, but would have to pay for other ones... only have those and two 4GB IDEs, but I thought SCSI to be faster and less CPU killing... We have enough space here, just no money for this server :) I assumed by money he meant the cost of electricity (and your time to replace them when they go bad), since it's difficult to buy that size nowadays. The cost of two drives is about twice the cost of one drive, no matter the logical size. To me, anything under 160g is a waste, so I guess it's subjective! =) -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: 2 * DVI configuration
On Fri, Jun 30, 2006 at 07:43:02AM +0200, Oliver Lehmann wrote: I probably want to stick with radeon since I use an amd64 and there is - as far as i know - no dualhead supporting driver (the xorg one) with dualhead support for nvidea. The second point is that I don't want to spend much Both the nv(4) and x11/nvidia-driver drivers support multi-head. In fact I've setup 3-4 heads using two cards, each with dual support. So right now I'm thinking about buying 2 PCI radeon cards and kick the AGP one out - will that work properly? It shouldn't matter what cards/slots you put the video cards in, X.org supports multi-head configurations with different and similar cards. The only problem I've seen is with motherboards that have onboard video, I've not been able to use both the onboard video and a video card at the same time. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SATA Raid motherboard
On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 05:23:06PM +0200, Nagy L?szl? Zsolt wrote: Sam Clements ?rta: I do believe only RAID 0 or 1 is supported in a two disk configuration. yes, the other RAID levels require 3 drives or more. Also, note that ataraid cannot yet write this metadata format so you'll have to use the BIOS to create rebuild your RAID's... Thank you. Of course I can use the BIOS to create the mirrored set. But after that, can I install FreeBSD with the standard installer? I'm not sure if 'ataraid' is included in GENERIC. Will the installer notice the RAID-1 array as a new physical drive? It depends on which version of FreeBSD you are using. Anything recent (5.4, 5.5, 6.0, 6.1) has ataraid in GENERIC. You'll probably have to setup the raid manually (instead of sysinstall) using atacontrol(8)-- the man page is pretty helpful. Unfortunately, I do not have the hardware yet, so I cannot try this. A real SCSI RAID controller would be too expensive for me. If I cannot install the whole system on the mirrored set, then probably it is better to use gvinum, because it allows me to buy a cheaper motherboard and use different hard drives. However, gvinum also has disadvantages (cannot mirror the root fs, or it is too difficult and I'm not familiar with vinum...) Correct, gvinum has disadvantages, but mirroring the root FS is actually pretty easy: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/vinum-root.html gvinum doesn't have all the functionality of the original vinum (yet). But if you're just using RAID-1 (mirroring), why not use gmirror(8)? From my observations, gmirror performs better than hardware mirroring, in general. -- Rick C. Petty ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
