Subject: Problems and Bugs encoutered on Armada 1110
To: NetBSD port-i386 Mailing List <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Sascha Wilde <wilde@sha-bang.de>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/10/2004 12:55:06
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Hello,

beeing soewhat new to NetBSD (well, in fact NetBSD was my thirst unix
years ago on an Amiga, but the last Version I used before switching to
Linux on iX86 were 1.3.x) I'd like to discuss here two problems I
observed befor writing bug-reports.

The host in question is an old Compaq Armada 1110 Notebook (Pentium
i586 75Mhz, 8 MiByte RAM).

The first Problem is about the pci and/or pciide driver.  The latest
Version I hat running without problems is NetBSD 1.4.2.  (I'm not sure
if 1.4.3 worked):

+------ dmesg snippet NetBSD 1.4.2 ---------------------------------
| pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1
| pci0: i/o enabled, memory enabled
| pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0
| pchb0: Opti 82C557 (rev. 0x14)
| pcib0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0
| pcib0: Opti 82C558 (rev. 0x02)
| vga1 at pci0 dev 2 function 0: Cirrus Logic CL-GD7543 (rev. 0x00)
| wsdisplay0 at vga1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
| pciide0 at pci0 dev 20 function 0: Opti 82C621 (rev. 0x12)
| pciide0: bus-master DMA support present, but unused (no driver
| support)
| pciide0: primary channel wired to compatibility mode
| pciide0: primary channel interrupting at irq 14
| wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <ST9810AG>
| wd0: drive supports 16-sector pio transfers, lba addressing
| wd0: 773MB, 1572 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 1584968
| sectors
| wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2
+-------------------------------------------------------------------

In all later Versions (including NetBSD 1.6.2 RC3) the pciide looses
its interrupt, detects an error, trys to "repair it" and repeats so
for nearly each and every block it trys to read. (This is a dump from
Memory).  This misbehavior damages the file-system unrecoverable
(thats why I have no logs, sorry) -- I had to reinstall the system
=66rom scratch.  (I tryed that with at least four Kernel Versions
1.5.3, 1.6.1 and 1.6.2 RC3 and current -- took me lots of time.)

By luck I diskovered a workaround:  the 1.6.2 RC3 GENERIC_TINY Kernel
worked, so I looked at the configuration differences and it turned
out, that it had no pci support at all.  So a kernel with only ISA
support runs just fine, but I think thats not what one realy wants...

When reporting, would this be a "kern" or a "port-i386" bug?



The second Problem is a known issue, which IMHO should be better
documented:  starting with 1.4.3 my pcmcia NICs stopped working (two
different ne2 clones).  They were detected but than the kernel issued
an "where did the card go?" and the interface where unusable.

By diging in the maillinglist archives I found out that by setting:

options         PCIC_ISA_ALLOC_IOBASE=3D0x0400
options         PCIC_ISA_ALLOC_IOSIZE=3D0x00ff

in the kernel configuration, the problem can be solved.

The problem I see here, is that the information is really hard to find
(its mentioned in the sys/dev/isa/i82365_isasubr.c sourcefile, but in
the i386 GENERIC* configuration files these options are missing and
the pcic(4) manpage doesn't give any hints either.  Maybe a FAQ entry
would be neat?

Where would this problem report belong, "misc"?


Any thoughts are highly welcome,
cheers
sascha
--=20
Sascha Wilde
"Structure is _nothing_ if it is all you got.  Skeletons _spook_ people if
 thwy try to walk around on their own.  I really wonder why XML does
 not."            -- Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> in comp.lang.lisp

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