Curious failure...

[Robert G. Brown]

On Fri, 3 Dec 1999, Mike Isely wrote:

> If the aic7xxx driver maps the adapter into memory space (I think it
> does), then it could have mapped over what it thought was empty space, but
> because there was real memory there (that went undetected), Bad Things
> might have resulted...  The same scenario would be possible for any memory
> mapped device (thinking about the video card here). 

That does indeed sound plausible and corresponds to my intuition that 64
MB OUGHT to be enough to boot a stripped kernel, on the face of things.
If this is correct, however, it is a pretty serious bug unless/until
kernels are able to "guarantee" that they can identify the actual memory
in a system without exceptions.

The one curious thing, though, is that the bug bit only for the SMP
kernel; the UP kernel (which still wasn't getting the memory right)
successfully loaded the UP adaptec module in initrd on the RH
boot/install floppy or from the disk.  The network failed to work
(sometimes) even for the UP kernel, but I suspect that this is a
separate issue.

I do have a very nice test system if Doug Ledford or anyone else wants
to suggest a way of finding out if this is the problem and/or finding a
fix for it.  I already tried (repeatedly!) to use the debug options
built into the aic7xxx driver but got very little from them -- the
driver simply goes belly up with a reset bus loop -- waiting for device
0.  Needless to say, I played extensively with options as described in
README.aic7xxx and with the reset delay to no avail.  Again, the system
ran for literally years with 2.0.3x and various aic7xxx driver revisions
including the very latest one and runs just fine now with a 2.2.12 UP
kernel (or 2.2.13 UP) or 2.1.9x SMP (last 2.1 kernel I tried) -- this is
a fairly recent and apparently SMP-specific problem.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb@phy.duke.edu