on 9/12/01 8:52 PM, Donald Lee at donlee_ppc@icompute.com wrote:

> It is possible that you are having trouble with cables and/or
> termination settings, but my bet is that the driver has bugs and/or
> the drives and the card driver do not get along well.

I was beginning to expect as much.

> As long as you have a proper twisted pair cable (not flat ribbon)
> and a proper terminator (lvd!), and don't have some drive terminator
> set on in the middle of the bus, I'd say the cables are probly OK.
> 
> I have tried a 39160 card in my PM 7600 and have seen the
> "someone reset channel A" problem.  It repeats the message
> continually and refuses to boot.

That's good information to have.  Thanks.

> I have personal experience with the Adaptec chips, and know
> that they are complex and have a number of "undocumented restrictions".
> It amazes me that the NetBSD team has built a functional driver for
> these cards (2940, 2940U2W and 39160 families).  This is especially
> impressive considering that from what I've seen, the work has
> been done without benefit of a SCSI analyzer.

I was under the impression that at least one version of the NetBSD driver
was a port of the FreeBSD driver.

Do you know of any other SCSI cards with Open Firmware ROMs that have solid
driver support in NetBSD?  I'd really like to find an LVD-capable SCSI card
that works reliably with NetBSD.

> Barring better advice from someone on the list (author of drivers??)
> I'd go with one of the older cards.

I ran with a 2940UW for a month or two, and I was seeing problems like this
every couple of weeks.  I was hoping the new card (29160) would improve
matters, but it just made things worse.  I've moved the card to a
non-production machine and it will stay there until I either get it to work
reliably or donate it to a machine running MacOS.

>> Please cc: monroe@criticalpath.com with any responses.  I'm on the
>> port-macppc list with my home address, but I really need to get responses as
>> soon as possible.

Thanks for your help,
-- monroe
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Monroe Williams                                  monroe@criticalpath.com