On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:38:42PM -0400, Sean Caron wrote:
Hi folks,
I've been contracted to try and get FreeBSD up and running on a Sun
Fire X4500 thumper type system. It's been claimed as far back as
2007 that this system is apparently supported with no major issues:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2007-May/003165.html
However in trying both FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, 8.1-STABLE (9/2010), and
7.3-STABLE (9/2010), I am getting the exact same failure mode as
this fellow:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=14887
The system boots up, I don't see anything pertaining to disks at all
in the boot messages, and, unsurprisingly the installer claims that
no disks are found.
I've tried this just booting normally, hitting 6 at the boot menu
and manually loading the mvs driver:
load mvs
boot
Nothing works. I've tried disabling ACPI but that just causes
FreeBSD to hang at boot.
...
Though I haven't actually verified this booting with something else
e.g. Linux and looking at the PCI information, my understanding is
that this system is based on the Marvell MV88SX6081 SATA controller
which seems to be supported from looking at the source code of the
mvs driver. The PCI ID string for this controller, 0x608111ab, is
right there in the source. This isn't even a particularly new piece
of hardware.
Is there anyone out there who has a Sun Fire X4500 up and running OK
with FreeBSD? If so - what's the secret? Is there something in the
BIOS that I need to flip? Maybe there are different revs of this
hardware each with a different SATA controller chip?
I'm really interested in working in concert with someone in the know
to do whatever it takes to hopefully get this resolved; if anyone
can lend a hand please drop me a line.
My recommendation:
Boot a FreeBSD LiveFS CD[1] in verbose mode (it's one of the boot menu
items). Once you have a shell, mount a USB flash drive, floppy drive,
or anything that you can write to and save output from the following two
commands into separate files then provide them here (links preferred;
sometimes the mailing list eats MIME attachments):
$ dmesg -a
$ pciconf -lvc
This should help in determining what might be going on. I'm advocating
verbose boot because if there's an mvs(4) controller detected but it's
not attaching/initialising correctly, verbose mode might indicate what's
going on. Hard to say.
If you find that there's no mvs(4) driver being attached, you can try
hitting 6 to drop to the loader prompt, enter load mvs like you
have been, then boot -v to boot verbose. You might want to save
output from doing that too into separate files as well.
I'm also CC'ing mav@ who works on the mvs(4) driver.
[1]: Snag an appropriate 8.1-STABLE-201009 snapshot if you could,
from whatever mirror suits you best, e.g.:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/201009/
--
| Jeremy Chadwick j...@parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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