On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Richard Rauch wrote:

> Some time ago, I was reporting terrible performance problems with my IDE
> hard drive under the on-board VIA IDE controller.  This afternoon, I
> picked up a $20 controller from SIIG.  Under NetBSD dmesg, it probes as:
 [...]
> I've tried turning off all of the PCI and IDE frills in my BIOS, but I
> can't get it to behave any better.  I'm going to go try running it under
> GNU/LINUX and will post a followup.  In the meantime...

GNU/LINUX panics (apparently in a reliable spot; I had it panic twice when
trying to mount ``vfs'', I believe; I didn't write down the details).

Further playing revealed this:

If I boot from a NetBSD CD, I can access the partitions.  Sort of.  When
doing a large dd read test, NetBSD gave me a lost interrupt error and
seemed to freeze.

Feeling experimental, I used the CD's bootloader to reboot, but told it to
boot wd0a:netbsd.  This got me a ways into the boot process, until (around
the time it started sshd, I believe), it gave me another lost interrupt.
It seemed to die a hard death, so I recorded the interrupt, killed the
power, unplugged it, swapped the cable back to the built-in IDE, and
brought the system back up.  (It took rather a long time to finish fsck on
the /usr partition, but it's all happy now, as far as I can tell.)

Anyway, here's the lost interrupt information, if it helps any:

 /~~~ kernel message

pciide1:0:0: lost interrupt
        type: ata tc_bcount 8192 tc_skip: 0
pciide1:0:0: bus_master DMA error: missing interrupt, status 0x21

 \___ kernel message

(a) Would NetBSD have had any chance to recover if I let it?  It didn't
actually *say* that it was panicking, but it also seemed pretty dead.

(b) Are there known problems with the ``Triones/Highpoint HPT366/370 IDE
Controller''?  Bear in mind that the NetBSD bootloader seemed to die with
it, too, before actually loading the kernel.  Bad hardware?  Or could
updating the bootloader and booting a -current kernel fix the problems?
(Also bear in mind that the bootloader *worked* when loaded from CD from
the old controller, in a 1.5.2 bootable CD; the hard disk is using the
NetBSD boot-selector, really, so it may not be using the same software to
boot the kernel.)

(c) I put my CD on the new controller, experimentally; it is not showing
up *at*all*.  (I put it on the second connector, though; the first
connector I left for the hard disk.  Is it normal not to probe a second
channel/controller on the card if the first isn't connected?)


(The boot-selector fails as soon as I hit F4 for NetBSD; it doesn't give
me the 5-second countdown...)

My present thought is to just take this controller back and swap it for
something else.  (I didn't really see enough to say if the disk drive
performed better under the new controller before locking up.  Although,
when I booted from CD, I could mount the disk, I didn't have it running
long enough to say if it was performing any better.

However, while I still have the controller, is there anything that I can
do to further test it, or any information that someone would like?


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu