On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 09:08:23AM -0700, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> Just a note to you all thanking you for your effort. Manuel made me 
> some boot floppies with the changes suggested, and although the 
> controller is now properly identified, the hard drive is not.
> 
> Unless I hear differently from you (and I'm certainly not expecting 
> to), I'm going to assume that this can't get fixed in time for 1.5.1. 
> And, given that this will be my production machine for my main system 
> for the next few years, I need to move on. FreeBSD 4.2 and 4.3 
> install fine on the system, so I'm going with FreeBSD 4.3 (just 
> waiting for the CD-ROM to arrive).
> 
> Here's what I sent to Manuel the other day. If you have other boot 
> floppies you want me to test in the next two days, by all means let 
> me know. I still have very warm feelings for NetBSD, and think it 
> would be a shame if it didn't work on a system as popular as the Dell 
> 1550 rackmount.

Well, on my side I don't have much clues about what's happening.
I suspect that when the adapter's registers are memory mapped, something
behaves differently. Here's the note in the driver about this:
/* XXXX some i386 on-board chips act weird when memory-mapped */
#ifndef __i386__
#define AHC_ALLOW_MEMIO
#endif
and indeed we seem to run into this.
Now there must be a workaround, as other OSes runs on this machine.
But I've no clues what it can be.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
--