Re: Add warning notes for known quirkly ata chipsets
I don't know any others offhand Word is that nforce4 plus Maxtor or Hitachi disks gives data corruption. Nforce4 plus Seagate is said to be okay. http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t8171.html I have nforce4-ultra with 4 Seagate 7200.8 SATA drives and have not observed any data corruption. I have have copied many multi-GB files from one disk to another, and afterwards cmp(1) says they are identical. I picked the nforce4-ultra because the other AMD64 chipsets did not have NCQ. I have not had any problems with the nf4 chipset. (But then I don't have any Maxtor or Hitachi disks hooked to it.) On the other hand, I *have* seen data problems with a Maxtor PATA drive on NetBSD/alpha (not a nforce4 chipset, obviously). Read the same sector three times and get three different results. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Open Graphics Project looking for reviewers
The Open Graphics Project is designing an open source graphics/video board. Supposed to have 2 dual-link DVI, and TV-out. They recently released the preliminary schematic, and are looking for people to review it. Hardware bugs, changes that would help the device drivers, etc. If you have ever complained about a hardware design, here is your chance to influence a design *before* the mistake is committed to silicon. schematic and BOM at: http://natsuki.kinali.ch/ http://opengraphics.org/ Beware, some of the info here is out of date. mailing list archive: http://lists.duskglow.com/open-graphics Step one is FPGA to work the bugs out. (and perhaps useful for other things) Step two will be ASIC ( smaller, cheaper, less heat, and faster then the FPGA ) ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Improving FreeBSD's hardware compatibility - TV tuners
analog TV? what's that? isn't everyone going digital? (yes, I know that analog TV will be with us for a long time due to security cams and other uses..) Broadcast analog TV will be going away soon. Yet there will be continue to be some uses for analog capture. So I recommend concentrating first on tuners that handle both analog and digital. Work is in progress on the Dvico Fusion5 tuners. The Fusion5 is nice because it is available in a USB version, which does not require a slot. Another tuner worthy of a BSD driver is the HD3000. Does both analog and digital in a variety of formats (NTSC, PAL, 8VSB, QAM, etc.) Has working Linux drivers with source. The only tuner I know of that is documented to be friendly to fair use rights. The Fusion5 and HD3000 use different chips. If one doesn't work well in a particular reception environment, the other might. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nVidia chipsets?
MBO DFI, s. AM2, Infinity nF-M2I, nFORCE 4, Is this the same nFORCE 4 used on the socket 939 boards? I have a 939 with nforce 4 ultra. (ultra means it supports SATA's NCQ queueing) I'm running FreeBSD 6.0 on it. Do ATA SATA ports, ethernet and sound work? The nforce Ethernet works, but I've only used it for a few minutes, and didn't stress it at all. I haven't tried sound with FreeBSD. PATA and SATA work. It can read from 4 SATA disks at once as fast as the data comes off the platters (65-70MB/s at the fast end of the platters). I'm running soft updates and have the disks' write cache in write-through mode to avoid scrambled filesystems. In write-through mode I get about 6-7 MB/s. If anyone knows how to turn on SATA NCQ, please let me know. But there is a problem. Writing to one drive slows down writes to an unrelated drive. (I'm not using any form of RAID.) See the processes not getting fair share of available disk I/O thread in -questions for more info on this problem. At this point I don't know if this problem has anything to do with the nforce chip or not. What about an ATI graphics card? My board has an onboard ATI chip. Xorg seems happy with it, but ATI doesn't support sync-on-green, so it is useless with my monitor. The nforce USB works, although I haven't stressed it. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Recommended SATA controllers?
Looking for some form of SATA controller with good support. Currently running FreeBSD 6.2. Bonus points if it also works well with NetBSD Linux (machine triple boots). I don't need RAID. Has there been any progress getting a driver working for Silicon Image 3124? Or any SATA controller with NCQ? Do any of the USB to SATA controllers work well under FreeBSD? Or 1394/firewire to SATA? PCI slots are full. PCIe-x1, USB-2, firewire-400 available. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Non-raid PCIe SATA controller with 8 ports?
- as you mentioned, without the battery backup the cache on the controller would have to be write-through, which disabled much of the advantage of the thing. I can't have NCQ on the NVidia SATA ports, Yes, very annoying to choose hardware that supports NCQ and then discover you can't use it due to no software support. :-( Surely someone can translate this from penguin to daemon? http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/libata/archive/2.6.17-nv-adma.patch.bz2 and hence have to use the disk's write cache. Huh? Is a write-back cache in a disk somehow safer than a write-back cache in a controller? We really really need NCQ. :-/ ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Documentation for AMD/ATI GPUs is now available.
AMD/ATI has released the first of the documentation for their GPUs. http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/42589_rv630_rrg_1.01o.pdf 6404655 bytes http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/RRG-216M56-03oOEM.pdf 7013853 bytes ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
SiI 3124 and Re: External SATA JBOD
I am thinking about adding an external Case with 4 haddrives to my server that should not be running 247. In ancient times this was done via SCSI and simply worked (turn on, rescan SCSI, mount). I suppose you could still use SCSI today if you don't mind paying $C$I price$. If the only reason for wanting an external box is the ability to power the drives down, you could make a custom power cable with a switch inline. There are panels with switches that fit standard 3.5 bays, so you don't have to do any metalwork, just a little soldering. If an additional SATA drive appears, does the FreeBSD kernel notice and handle it (like USB) ? Is a rescan needed (like SCSI) ? A reboot? I already have an external drive connected via USB, but I am not able to read SMART using this link. Another issue with the USB bridges is you can't turn the disk's write cache on and off. :-( Do firewire bridges allow access to the write cache control bit, and SMART data? How is FreeBSD support for firewire disks? I did something similar with an Addonics 4-drive housing and a SiI 3124 based SATA controller. That meant writing some of the driver for the 3124, but it was fun (and the Soren did the heavy lifting). Does this mean that the SiI 3124 device driver is working? Is it ready for prime time? I've been watching -hardware and -drivers but haven't seen anything. I don't think PM is supported yet. Certainly not in 6-STABLE, possibly in 7. I remember Soren was delaying PM work until NCQ was in; So NCQ isn't ready yet? :-( Are there *any* controllers with working NCQ support? I had PM support without NCQ in 6-STABLE at one point, but that severely limits the total throughput of the drives. I would think that SATA-300 could support 4 drives without slowing them down, is there some other bottleneck? ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: no cd0/pass0 devices under 7.0 (though acd0 is there)
What can I do to bring cd0/pass0 back? Check your config file for device atapicam That's it, thanks a lot! Btw, when did this behavior change and why's there's no atapicam in GENERIC config? Or was it never there actually and I'm missing something? http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=94417 I still think that it should work out of the box. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: no cd0/pass0 devices under 7.0 (though acd0 is there)
I still think that it should work out of the box. It does. kldload atapicam works perfectly. It does *not* work out of the box. You have to know to add device atapicam to the config file, or to kldload atapicam. man -k dvd does not yield anything helpful. This is at least the 2nd time I've seen the device atapicam method suggested. kldload atapicam would be the easier method. This should not be enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel. I need my SCSI devices probed at startup to get my scanner to function correctly, and having atapicam loaded before the scanner is found by SANE causes problems. Adding kldload atapicam to rc.local would be late enough to not spoil the probing of real SCSI devices, right? (I'm assuming that loader.conf might be too early.) ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PCIe SATA controllers, are JMB363 or Sil3132 good?
Looking for a PCIe SATA controller. Are the JMB363 or Sil3132 any good? Any limitations (including speed) or problems? Other controllers to consider? I don't need RAID. More than 2 ports per card would be a significant plus. The 3124 has 4 ports, but the PCI slots are all full. :-( ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD 7.0 SATA Controller
the next step im going to take is installing 6.2 and remaking the world but adding device aptic to the kernel. I think you mean device apic to the kernel? No, it is device aptic. It was in 6 but removed from 7. I had to add aptic to get my nforce4-ultra board to boot 7. Given that 6 runs on Shaun's machine and 7 doesn't, adding aptic is a useful thing to try. There is no aptic device on RELENG_6. I just did a grep -ri aptic /usr/src on our RELENG_6 box and found absolutely no trace of said device. You are thinking of apic. Typo. Should be device atpic. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Foxconn BIOS (and maybe others?) has ACPI problems
His diplomatic skills could use polishing, but if he is right about the BIOS it could explain some ACPI problems. Note that he lists FreeBSD as well as Linux as not working in his letter to the FTC. http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869249 ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IBM eServer x225 - LSI 1030 SCSI - BTX Halted / infinite loop - Need help booting recompiled kernel so i can install
I'm trying to install FreeBSD 7.0 on my IBM eServer x225 (8647-5CG) (1x Xeon 2.8GHz(512KB), 2x 2048MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM (ecc), 2x 74GB 10K rpm U320 HDD, Ultra320 SCSI LSI 1030 controller, 48x CD-ROM, Broadcom NetXtreme 10/100/1000 Integrated Ethernet, ATI Rage XL) Then it stops. If i remove both the harddrives i can boot into the freebsd installer, but as there are no drives, there is nowhere to install. What i need to know is how to compile a different kernel, where do i find drivers for the LSI 1030 SCSI-controller? What i see in the old kernel.conf for freebsd 6.0 (or is it 6.2) contains device mpt # LSI-Logic MPT-Fusion device mfi # LSI MegaRAID SAS If disconnecting the SCSI drives fixes the problem, I'd guess that you already have a device driver for the SCSI-controller, but it has a problem. You can look into debugging the driver, or you can use a different controller (e.g. PATA/SATA/Firewire/USB or a different SCSI controller) Is 1030 short for 53c1030 ? The 7.0 mpt(4) man page lists LSI Logic 53c1030, LSI Logic LSI2x320-X (Single and Dual Ultra320 SCSI) as being supported. I have no idea what they are but SAS is serial attached sata isn't it? serial attached scsi And if they're uncommented it should mean that they're active and that they're most likely actually already running in the kernel i'm trying to boot from the installation cd? yes Can i get other drivers/modules or whatever they're called? You can uncomment additional drivers and build a new kernel. Or you can load additional drivers after booting with the kldload(8) command (man kldload). Obviously kldload is not useful for drivers that are needed to boot. But if you install to SATA (or whatever), you could boot from SATA and then kldload a custom driver for the LSI 1030 with extra debugging printfs. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Test: HighPoint RocketRaid 3120 PCIex1 2xSATA controller under FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE
If you get about the same scores with dd, try using a higher read-ahead (vfs.read_max value, set it to 32 for example). Also sometimes it's required to use a higher blocksize to get full potential, try: newfs -U -b 32768 /dev/raid device Warning: using 64KiB blocksize you risk hanging the system under heavy load (like 2 bonnies running simultaniously). What's this about 64KiB blocksize hanging the system? Hang awhile then recover, or hang forever need a reboot? Is this a RAID thing or are normal disks at risk? It isn't obvious why a 64KiB blocksize would cause a problem in this day of multi GiB memory. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: alpha/127248: System crashes when many (7) serial port terminals (vt320-vt510) connected to the server via com to usb adapter and 2-usb hubs.
[ -usb@ added to existing thread ] This is because USB is absolutely crap for this purpose. RS232 terminals, especially with long cables, can produce several kind of spikes and ground loops, which USB is very very sensitive about. Many things about USB are crap (thanks, inthell), but if a USB to RS-232 bridge cannot handle normal spikes and ground loops, I'd blame the bridge, not USB itself. If the problem is spikes and ground loops there is probably some RS-232 filter/isolator available to clean them up. There could be a bug in the bridge which needs a software workaround. In any case the system shouldn't crash. Are there specific makemodel USB to RS-232 bridges that people have had good luck with? USB can't handle spikes and ground loops. As said: use isolated devices, so you don't have the loops and spikes. You can blame the device for not being isolated, but you expect every device to provide expensive workaround for a design failure. USB is designed for cheap stuff - that's all about it. Surely a good USB to RS-232 bridge (if one exists?) or a RS-232 filter/isolator (assuming they exist?) would be *far* less expensive than the server class alpha you suggest below. And IIRC it is just speculation that the original poster's problem is caused by spikes or ground loops. Yes - the system shouldn't crash, but don't expect it ever being fixed for FreeBSD-alpha. There is a 6.4 coming out, yes? It is unlikely that the problem is alpha specific. If an alpha crashes, other archs will likely crash. My advise is to use a completely other technology to connect the terminals. A galvanic isolated USB device might work, but there are lot of PCI and Ethernet devices on the market which are more solid by design than USB. The problem with PCI is the limited number of slots. :-( Well - not realy with server class alphas... In my world, a server means 1-4 full height 19 racks with quite large price tags and powercooling requirements. Some people think a server is a pee-cee. So I'm not sure what you mean by server class alphas. I have what I would call a workstation class alpha, which cost an obscene amount to get 6 PCI slots instead of 4, and at times they are all full. So I can't use up a slot just to get a couple more RS-232 ports. How many PCI slots does a server class alpha have? RS-232 doesn't require PCI levels of bandwidth. Something like a USB to RS-232 bridge could be a good solution, if I knew which makemodel of bridge worked well with *BSD. Poking around on the web I can't even find what chip they have inside. Do these bridges actually work properly, or do they have gotchas like the USB to SATA/PATA bridges? Ethernet could be a good solution for some applications, if you can get the software to deal with it. NFS is crap, *real* distributed file systems handled devices transparently. (thanks, Sun) This is a different topic. For RS232 Ethernet is quite reasonable. For some applications yes. But some apps want to open /dev/ttyXX and do ioctls on it. How does one use such an app on Free/Net/OpenBSD with the RS-232 device on some Ethernet connected RS-232 port? Does anyone make firewire to RS-232 bridges? Or stay with the old DEC devices - they are rock solid even after all those years. It is not obvious what old DEC devices you are referring to. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: LG combo drive and Attansic Technology ethernet card on Asus P5Q Pro
The drive is a new LG combo drive, I believe GH22LP20 or something close to
it.
I have an older LG PATA combo drive which works ok.
Does it show up when booting? (Does dmesg work from the installation shell?)
Maybe you need to kldload atapicam ? Or is that only needed for writing,
I forget...
The only thing I can think of is that the P5Q boards use a Marvell
ATA/IDE controller (yes, you read that correctly). I wonder if FreeBSD
somehow lacks support for this...
7.0 ata man page claims support for:
Marvell 88SX5040, 88SX5041, 88SX5080, 88SX5081, 88SX6041,
88SX6081, 88SX6101, 88SX6141.
I also tried to install Ubuntu and it works fine (but I really would
like to have FreeBSD!).
Have you tried NetBSD or OpenBSD?
thank you very much for your help. I downloaded the 7.1 prerelease,
but unfortunately didn't solve the problem with the CD/DVD. As for
the ethernet card, it's a kind of catch 22: to see if the card is
working I should install the OS, but I cannot from the DVD.
Who says you *have* to install from a DVD? You might be able to install
from NetBSD or OpenBSD, or maybe even penguinix. Or connect the disk
to some other FreeBSD box. Installing Unix is basically fdisk and/or
disklabel, newfs, mount, tar, edit config files, reboot. Sometimes you
need to get creative.
# mount partition(s) for FreeBSD on /mnt
# mount iso on /mnt2
export DESTDIR=/mnt
cd /mnt2/7.0-RELEASE
for foo in base doc catpages dict games info manpages proflibs ports lib32
do
cd ${foo}
./install.sh
cd ..
done
Understood. This situation is very frustrating; people often run into
on Windows as well (How do I get the Ethernet driver for my NIC from
the web site if Windows doesn't already have support for my NIC?!).
Plug in a working Ethernet card.
Use RS-232 and ppp.
CD/DVD
attach disk to a working machine
etc. etc.
I cannot even install over FTP, because the institution I am in wants
my MAC address to allow this pc to connect to internet and I cannot
get to the MAC address without installing an OS (at least, I don't
know how... I tried an Ubuntu LiveCD, but it doesn't recognize the
ethernet card, either).
Sometimes the MAC address is printed on a sticker.
Copy files to a local machine, ftp from that machine?
Copy ISOs to a spare partition somehow. Then mount the ISOs using
mdconfig kludge.
___
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Re: alpha/127248: System crashes when many (7) serial port terminals (vt320-vt510) connected to the server via com to usb adapter and 2-usb hubs.
Surely a good USB to RS-232 bridge (if one exists?) or a RS-232 filter/isolator (assuming they exist?) would be *far* less expensive than the server class alpha you suggest below. It depend on how much RS232 you need and how many slots the OP has free. Nevertheless a good RS232 bridge if needed in number are not cheap either - ntoe that you can get affordable PCI extenders as well. The PCI expanders I've seen cost almost as much as getting an entire additional machine. The problem with PCI is the limited number of slots. :-( Well - not realy with server class alphas... In my world, a server means 1-4 full height 19 racks with quite large price tags and powercooling requirements. Some people think a server is a pee-cee. So I'm not sure what you mean by server class alphas. Server doesn't mean rack, but beside from a few OEM boards and small 19 system all alphas have lots of free slots available. I have what I would call a workstation class alpha, which cost an obscene amount to get 6 PCI slots instead of 4, and at times they are all full. So I can't use up a slot just to get a couple more RS-232 ports. How many PCI slots does a server class alpha have? Well the AS4100 I have already has 8 slots which is not that uncommon for alpha servers. I'd call an alpha with only 8 slots a workstation class machine. It wouldn't take much to fill up 8 slots. The real big ones can even have a few hundred slots. A few hundred slots would be server class. And I'm sure a price tag to match, along with floor space, power, and cooling requirements. USB to RS-232 bridge could be a good solution, if I knew which makemodel of bridge worked well with *BSD. Poking around on the web I can't even find what chip they have inside. Really forget about USB to RS232. It is not the chip which is the problem it is the principal. You really need galvanic isolation, because USB can't handle ground loops, which no cheap device has. You can use any kind of chip with propper isolation, but then it is likely more expensive than any other kind of solution. I assume this is marketing driven. Adding a few optos can't increase the manufacturing cost *that* much. Sounds like a market opportunity for someone. Do these bridges actually work properly, or do they have gotchas like the USB to SATA/PATA bridges? The prolific bridges work well enough if you don't have a ground loop and FTDI chips are better IMHO. Thanks. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID 5 - serious problem
FreeBSD 7.0-Release Intel D975XBX2 motherboard (Intel Matrix Storage Technology) 3 WD Raptor 74 GB in a RAID 5 array 1 WD Raptor 150 GB as a standalone disk / and /var mounted on the standalone,, /usr on the RAID 5 I believe what happened was that one of the disks didn't respond for such a long time, that is was marked bad. And afterwards the same thing happened for the other disks. When I try to boot the system, all three disks are marked Offline. I am very desperate not to lose my data, In that case, step one is to use dd(1) to make a bit-for-bit copy of the three drives to some trusted media. Since they are marked bad/offline, you might need to move them to a controller that doesn't know anything about RAID. (Note that there is risk here, and in almost anything you do at this point.) Once you have this bit-for-bit backup, you can run any experiment you like to attempt to recover your data. If the experiment goes bad, you can dd the exact original contents back using dd, then try a different experiment. While you're at it, make a normal backup using dump(8) or whatever you normally use, of / and /var. Once you have *everything* backed up, you can do risky experiments like booting linux. My personal approach to avoiding data loss is (a) avoid buggy things like inthell and linux. (b) FFS with softdeps and the disk write cache turned off, (c) full backups. I don't have enough ports to run RAID. :-( The downside is that FreeBSD doesn't have NCQ support yet (when? when? when?) so writes are slow. :-( ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID 5 - serious problem
My personal approach to avoiding data loss is (a) avoid buggy things like inthell and linux. Interesting, being as we have another thread going as of late that seems to link transparent data loss with AMD AM2-based systems with certain models of Adaptec and possibly LSI Logic controller cards. This is the SCSI with = 4 GiB thread? Sounds like an address map problem. I like Intel as much as I like AMD That is your right. Inthell has a long history of buggy products, attempting to hide/ignore bugs, poor customer support, outright theft, etc. AMD isn't perfect, but the list of bad things is far far shorter. And there are other companies to consider besides just inthell and AMD. -- but it's important to remember that it's becoming more and more difficult to provide flawless stability on things as the complexities increase. Computers are complex devices and always have been. Yes this makes it difficult to get everything right. Yet it is possible to achieve very high levels of reliability, better than 5 9s. And I have no idea what your beef is with Linux. The quality is crap. Endless problems, including scrambled data. If the OP is successfully able to bring his array on-line using Linux, I would think that says something about the state of things in FreeBSD, would you agree? Both OSes have their pros and cons. It says linux got something right that FreeBSD got wrong. I never said that BSD gets *everything* right, or that linux gets *everything* wrong. (b) FFS with softdeps and the disk write cache turned off, This has been fully discussed by developers, particularly Matt Dillon. I can point you to a thread discussing why doing this is not only silly, but a bad idea. And if you'd like, I can show you just how bad the performance is on disks with WC disabled using UFS2 + softupdates. When I say bad, I'm serious -- we're talking horrid. And yes, I have tried it -- see PR 127717 for evidence that I *have* tried it. :-) I am WELL aware of how bad write performance is on disks with the write cache turned off. I get only about 10% of what the hardware can do, and with large files that is very noticeable. :-( But data integrity is important. (c) full backups. I'm curious what your logic is here too -- this one is debatable, so I'd like to hear your view. Things go wrong, and when they do backups are useful. The obvious problem is that a backup quickly becomes out of date as data changes. RAID stays current, but doesn't help with accidental file deletions, in cases where the entire machine dies (fire. flood, etc.), and so on. A proper RAID (that actually helps reliability rather than hurting it) plus off site backups gets you pretty close. A RAID with an off site mirror plus off site backups would be about as reliable as you can get. But if the rate of data changes is high the communication charges could be prohibitive. It all comes down to how important your data is and how much money is available. NCQ will not necessarily improve write performance. I doubt it will help if you have the disk's write cache turned on. I'm pretty sure it will help with write cache turned off. I believe Andrey Elsukov is working on getting NCQ support working when AHCI is in use (assuming I remember correctly). I look forward to having NCQ available. Write performance without it is really pathetic. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID 5 - serious problem
I like Intel as much as I like AMD That is your right. Inthell has a long history of buggy products, attempting to hide/ignore bugs, poor customer support, outright theft, etc. AMD isn't perfect, but the list of bad things is far far shorter. And there are other companies to consider besides just inthell and AMD. I'd rather not debate this, as it's off-topic. We can take it up privately if you desire, but keep in mind that my ideal system would be an AMD processor on an Intel chipset board -- but I'll probably be dead by the time that ever happens. Both companies could have much to learn from one another. Inthell apparently has some good fab people. If they were a designless fab house they might not be on my black list. No administrator in their right mind is going to disable WC unless the disks are behind some form of controller that does caching. (For NCQ stuff, see below.) The only setup I have found that doesn't lose data is FFS+softdep+WC off. So you think I am insane for wanting to not lose data? NCQ will not necessarily improve write performance. I doubt it will help if you have the disk's write cache turned on. I'm pretty sure it will help with write cache turned off. One thing I haven't tested or experimented with is disabling write caching on a drive that has NCQ. Since FreeBSD lacks NCQ right now, we could test this on Linux to see what the I/O difference is (I'm talking purely from a dd or bonnie++ perspective). The filesystem may be significant, and last time I looked, linux didn't support FFS r/w. I read something indicating that recent disks do NCQ much better than earlier ones, so NCQ support isn't binary. This, and people testing NCQ with the write cache on, could explain the results where NCQ doesn't help. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Areca vs. ZFS performance testing.
For the array(s) 9 x ST31000340AS 1tb disks 1 x ST31000333AS 1tb disk (trying to swap this for a ST31000340AS) There seems to be little difference between enabling and disabling the disk cache on the Areca. This leads me to two conclusions: 1. Disabling the write cache does nothing on Seagate drives. 2. IO to the drives is so slow that a write cache is irrelevant. I have a couple of the ST31000340AS 1TB disks as well as older lower capacity Seagates, and turning the write cache on/off makes a MASSIVE (roughly 10:1) difference in write speed. Jeremy reports about 13% with Seagate ST3120026AS: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hardware/2008-October/005450.html Perhaps there is something about the Areca or the testing? Is the write cache really getting turned on/off? You're getting about 2-3x the speed I'd expect if the write cache were off, so maybe it is still on but there is a bottleneck elsewhere? Have you tried a simple test with /dev/zero and dd to a raw drive to eliminate the effects of the filesystem? ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Promise SATA300 TX4302 feedback?
Your motherboard needs to be PCI 2.2 or 2.3 complaint according to the manual (you need to tell us what the board is for us to help here). Most should be unless they are very old (later Pentium III Coppermine onwards should be ok). Thanks Mark -- that's exactly what I was asking for :-) Is there a way to check this without physical access to the box? dmesg doesn't seem to contain this info; pciconf is hot helpful as well. If you know the make and model of the mainboard you could see if the specifications are online. Try the manufacturer's web site, or ask yahoo/google/... If the card you select isn't universal Voltage, you'll need to know if the slot is 5 Volt or 3.3 Volt. The keying is supposed to tell you, but some mainboards have a jumper to select the PCI Voltage, and I don't think moving the jumper changes the keying. :-) ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: PATA DVD on Asus P5Q Pro
The PATA-133/IDE interface is implemented via an additional Marvell 88SE6111 controller (SATA is driven via ICH10R). My problem is that the DVD drive is not seen by FreeBSD, although it is seen by the BIOS in the boot up phase. In the previous post Jeremy Chadwick kindly pointed out that the Marvell 88SE6111controller may not be supported by FreeBSD. I was wondering if this is still the case with the 7.1 Release You could try looking at the online ata(4) man page for 7.1 and see if the controller is listed. http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/man.cgi You could see if NetBSD or OpenBSD supports the controller and if so look into porting the support over to FreeBSD. and whether somebody could suggest a workaround that does not involve replacing the drive (e.g., is it possible to use some sort of converter cable from SATA to PATA? I apologize if this is complete nonsense, but I know virtually nothing about buses and connector types). They make chips that bridge between SATA and PATA. Chips: JM20330, SIL3611, Marvell 88SA8040 They make small boards with these chips, intended to plug into a drive and then provide the other type connector. Some have mounting holes, so you could use both a SATA and PATA cable and mount the board somewhere. The boards run US$8-30. Make sure the board can operate in the direction you need it to (SATA controller to PATA drive). Some boards have a jumper for this but some don't. Make sure the board has the correct gender PATA connector. The gender of the SATA connector isn't critical. If a normal cable doesn't work you can get a SATA extension cable. If you have a free PCIe slot (any size), the JMicron JMB363 provides 2 SATA ports and 1 PATA channel. FreeBSD suports the JMB363. These cards run US$10.50-$14. I'm sure there are a bunch of other PATA controller cards you could use. See the ata(4) man page. There are USB to SATA/PATA bridges available. $15 or so. I'm not fond of these as they tend to be slow, and I haven't found one that allows turning off the disk write cache. For a CD/DVD drive you might not care. There are firewire to PATA bridges available. One of these is buggy, but there might be chips that work properly. There are SCSI to PATA bridges available. If you want to be able to boot from CD/DVD, some of these options might not work, depending on the firmware on your mainboard. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Dealing with Seagate's problematic 7200.11 firmware.
Most of you have read about the problems with Seagate's 7200.11 disks. For those of you that haven't, the firmware on many of these drives is buggy, and can brick the drive when powering up or rebooting the system. Thus far, Seagate's response has been less than wonderful. We need a FLOSS solution. Goals: 1) Ability to read the number of log entries. 2) Ability to change the number of log entries. 3) Ability to install new firmware from Unix. We need for this to work with any flavor of Unix, on any CPU arch, without reboot or power cycle. We need for this to work on one drive without affecting other drives. I don't expect to be able to write FLOSS firmware for the drives, so this isn't listed as a goal. If you think you can, please feel free. The problem: IF the drive is powered down when there are 320 entries in this journal or log, then when it is powered back up, the drive errors out on init and won't boot properly - to the point that it won't even report it's information to the BIOS. Maxtorman, slashdot discussion [2] If Maxtorman is correct, then once the drive has been operating awhile, we have a 1 in 320 chance that the circular log is at entry 320. We want to be able to find out how many log entries the disk currently has, and we want to be able to change the number of log entries away from 320, while we wait for Seagate to get its act together and release firmware that works properly. Since Seagate's solution will require attaching the drive to an x86 system and booting a FreeDOS ISO from CD, if the log is at 320 that boot will brick the drive. There are other firmware problems with the 7200.11 series, but this is the biggie. Once Seagate releases working firmware, we want to be able to install it from Unix, on any CPU arch. Seagate's release can only install on x86 using FreeDOS. *ATA Commands that may be useful: command namecommand code in hex page [1] pdf page [1] Read Log Ext0x2F27 33 S.M.A.R.T. Read Log Sector 0xB0 / 0xD5 28,34 34,40 S.M.A.R.T. Write Log Sector 0xB0 / 0xD6 28,34 34.40 Write Log Extended 0x3F28 34 Download Microcode 0x9227 33 Questions: Is Maxtorman correct about the 320 log entries? Are the commands listed above the ones we need? What is the difference between the Log Extended and the S.M.A.R.T. Log Sector? Is Microcode the same as firmware? (Seagate uses the term firmware elsewhere in the manual, but I don't find any sort of write firmware command.) Where can we get more detailed info about these commands and how to use them? References: [1] Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Serial ATA Product Manual rev C August 2008 http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/desktop/Barracuda%207200.11/100507013c.pdf [2] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/21/0052236 ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: JMB363 and hotplugging?
SATA is supposed to support hotplugging, but I tried it with the nforce4-ultra and the kernel (FreeBSD 7.0 amd64) hung. :-( Of course you connected disks through a SATA backplane, which performs all the management.. Management? What management? umount swapoff (and allow time for i/o) atacontrol detach pull sata data cable observe hung kernel :-( press reset button :-( ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Inexpensive, low power, wall wart computer
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9634061300.html This looks promising: a $100 ($50 in volume) 5 Watt computer. 1.2GHz CPU, 512MB each of RAM and Flash Marvell 88F6281 Kirkwood SoC gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 ports Looks like the SoC also has a 2nd Ethernet port, 2 SATA parts, PCIe and other stuff that isn't brought out for some reason. http://linuxdevices.com/files/misc/marvell_88F6000_diagram.gif Anyone have an idea how much work it would take to get BSD running on this thing? Get the 2nd Ethernet working and have a 5 Watt firewall for personal and SOHO use. (Obviously you aren't going to run a Fortune-500 company through this thing.) Or use it as a USB device server. Bring the SATA ports out and make a small NAS. And so on. Unfortunately I don't see firewire listed. :-( ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
PCIe-x1 SATA controllers (was: Re: Adaptec 1405 on FreeBSD )
In message 4b027c3e.7020...@freebsd.org, Alexander Motin writes: - SiI3124-based - fast and functional. It is actually PCI-X one, but there are many boards with built-in PCIe bridges. Do any of these fit in a x1 slot? I was surprised, but yes. My google-fu fails me. Any make/model, URLs, or keywords? Syba PCI Express SATA II 4 x Ports RAID Controller Card SY-PEX40008 Does anyone other than Syba make these? I'm a bit leery of Syba after my experience with some of their other fine products. Reviews on newegg say it Gets a bit hot and gets quite hot under load, despite that big heatsink. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027 -- The interesting fact I have seen yesterday, SiI3132 is able to read 150MB/s, but write 170MB/s. I am not PCIe expert, but looks like transfer capabilities could be asymmetric. Also, and as soon as PCIe is duplex, I've also seen 110MB/s read from one drive, plus 100MB/s write to another, running at the same time. Seems odd. -- From what I can see, FreeBSD does not support the Marvell 88SE61xx SATA controllers? For example, the SATA2-PCIE1x12 has 4 SATA ports + 1 PATA channel, for US$30.13 http://www.span.com/product_info.php?cPath=24_714_2502products_id=16957 There is a similar SATA2-PCIE1X11 board with all ports internal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvell_Technology_Group_chipsets points to a patch for OpenBSD: http://www.webservertalk.com/message2133676.html and apparently penguinix supports them. -- Then we have this oddball, 2 SATA-300 ports + 2 SATA-150 ports: SYBA SY-PEX40013 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124029 ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Marvell MV88SX6081 on FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE
In message 4b13159d.9010...@darkbsd.org, Stephane LAPIE writes: On FreeBSD 8.0, attempting to scrub a ZFS pool results in a few I/O bursts (confirmed with zpool iostat), before totally freezing down and locking the ZFS pool (the system is still up and only ZFS based file systems are unusable in this state), probably to avoid data corruption. Occasionally I also witness a READ_DMA48 soft error (ECC corrected) error message showing up, on a random hard disk. And there are these, which you didn't mention: ad1: FAILURE - SET_MULTI status=3D51READY,DSC,ERROR error=3D4ABORTED ad12: FAILURE - SET_MULTI status=3D51READY,DSC,ERROR error=3D4ABORTED (No, I don't know what that means, sorry.) ad18: 1430799MB Seagate ST31500341AS CC1H at ata9-master SATA300 ad20: 1430799MB Seagate ST31500341AS SD1A at ata10-master SATA300 How old is the SD1A disk? As you may know, Seagate had various troubles with the .11 firmware. I have some of the ST31500341AS CC1H and mine are new enough that they are supposed to be ok. Therefore, I am inclined to think the motherboard/memory (a TYAN Thunder K8WE S2895) would be at fault here, I have been told that Tyan does a good job with memory, although even assuming that's true it could still be a memory problem. My Tyan board has a memory scrubbing feature that can be turned on in firmware, but I've never tried it. Also, you could try rotating the SIMMs and see if anything changes. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Marvell MV88SX6081 on FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE
In message 4b1392cf.5090...@darkbsd.org, Stephane LAPIE writes: Therefore, I am inclined to think the motherboard/memory (a TYAN Thunder K8WE S2895) would be at fault here, =20 I have been told that Tyan does a good job with memory, although even assuming that's true it could still be a memory problem. My Tyan board has a memory scrubbing feature that can be turned on in firmware, but I've never tried it. Also, you could try rotating the SIMMs and see if anything changes. The memory is brand new, from Corsair. I tried swapping the sticks (while still using the same slots) and strangely enough, some combinations just... don't boot at all. That sounds like a major clue that you probably have a very bad stick of memory (probably a hard error). I would try booting with just 1 stick at a time (or whatever the minimum is for your board) and isolate the bad stick. Most likely with 7.2 something landed on the bad location that doesn't actually get used, but with 8.0 something disk related lands there. Also, completely unrelated to the SATA controller, some quirks on this motherboard (though at BIOS level) have been annoying me quite a lot : - Booting FreeBSD from anything besides an IDE device has a 80% chance of freezing the computer at BTX level. - Sometimes the Option ROMs (this including the VGA card) are not loaded properly because of an out of memory problem at BIOS level. However, once the system is booted, it can go on for several months. (Though, I have witnessed one Fatal error 12: Page fault-type kernel panic in six months) Let me guess, Phoenix - AwardBIOS? On mine they can't even spell the name of the board correctly: TYAN Tomact K8E BIOS V1.00 022105 (should be Tomcat) Such quality control. Mine hangs in boot if I have 2 JMB363 cards in the 2 PCIe x1 slots. Moved one to the x16 slot and it boots. I've been blaming the JMB363 cards but maybe the Phoenix AwardBIOS is the problem child? Most of the time one of the cards doesn't do it's display the drives and give me 5.1 nanoseconds to hit some control character to enter a setup-a-raid thingy. And frequently FreeBSD doesn't see one of the controllers and thus doesn't make it to multiuser. I'd expect these events to be correlated but oddly they don't seem to be. Sometimes it takes several reboots to get all the controllers seen. I haven't seen an out of memory message, but the way things fly by perhaps I just missed it. It always works correctly the first time after a power cycle, so my theory is that the expansion cards aren't getting reset properly. I have a firewire PCI card that got into a funky mode and rebooting didn't fix it but a power cycle did. Tyan is supposed to be tier 1 but they aren't doing themselves any favors with that pathetic excuse for firmware. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Support for Broadcom Crystal HD video decoder chips?
The Broadcom Crystal HD BCM7001x series video decoder chips look very promising. Decodes mpeg2, H.264, etc. up to 1080p TDP of ~2 watts Drivers are available for OS-X, Linux and virus-server, so the info needed to create BSD drivers should be available. Firmware is appariently binary-only, grumble. http://www.broadcom.com/products/Consumer-Electronics/Netbook-and-Nettop-Solutions/BCM70012 http://www.broadcom.com/products/Consumer-Electronics/Netbook-and-Nettop-Solutions/BCM70015 http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/ http://www.logicsupply.com/blog/2009/11/16/the-little-pcie-card-that-could/ http://www.logicsupply.com/products/bcm970012 http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3701 http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Broadcom-BCM70015/ http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21226 ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Multiple serial consoles via null modem cable
From another thread awhile back, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: ] Anything that ] uses a Prolific chip will work well (supports custom serial rates, and ] does not drop/lose characters). The uplcom(4) driver is for this chip, ] and the man page lists off some consumer models/devices available. Also from the thread awhile back, Bernd Walter wrote: } This is because USB is absolutely crap for this purpose. } RS232 terminals, especially with long cables, can produce several kind } of spikes and ground loops, which USB is very very sensitive about. } The upcoming new USB stack does a lot about handling transmission } errors, but the underlying problem is USB and not FreeBSD. } The best thing software can do about this is avoiding the panics. } Nevertheless the new USB stack is likely not being merged into any alpha } supporting OS release, so even that will not happen for alpha. } } My advise is to use a completely other technology to connect the terminals. } A galvanic isolated USB device might work, but there are lot of PCI and } Ethernet devices on the market which are more solid by design than USB. If different systems are on different UPSs it might create a ground loop? If necessary, you can optically isolate the RS-232 line, which should fix the problem. http://www.rs232-converters.com/opto-isolated_converters/Opto-Isolated_RS232_RS485_RS422_Isolators.htm I have not actually tried this. This is just an example of the isolators available, not a recommendation for this specific product or vender. Google can find similar products. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: SiI 3132 goes crazy and marks both disks as Reserved after each reboot
I've added SiI 3132-based controller with two SATA disks to system, and almost lost my sanity: gstripe configuration becomes lost after each reboot. After some investigation, I found, that after each reboot last sector of disk contains SiI meta-information instead of GEOM:STRIPE one. I have a couple of SiI 3132 controllers (Masscool XWT-PCIE10) with GPT partitioned disks, and the last sectors still appear to contain the Sec GPT headers after several reboots. How to reset this state? And where SiI controller store information (additional to last sector)? I suspect your card's BIOS code. You could see if your mainboard has an option to not run expansion card BIOS code. You could see if there is a better version of BIOS code available for your card. KLUDGE If all else fails, you could create a backup copy of the last sector and have dd(1) restore it from rc.local or cron @reboot. /KLUDGE ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: PCI-X SATA (non HW-RAID) controller recommendation
having SMART work is probably a good idea Note that some (most?) of the USB-to-SATA bridges do not provide access to SMART, at least not on FreeBSD. Also can't turn off the write buffer, and no NCQ, and pathetically slow. I have the Silicon Image 3132 which is PCIe-x1 with 2 sata ports. Not as fast as it should be but fast enough for my needs. Works well with FreeBSD siis(4), which provides NCQ. Works well with the 3726 port multiplier. Talks to recent 600MB/s drives at 300MB/s, unlike JMB363 which doesn't like 600MB/s drives, even with the sata rev hint set. 300MB/s should be enough. With vanilla rotating drives even 150 is enough. Speed-wise, NCQ is far more important than 300 or 600. Problem is that recent drives are 600 and don't work with JMB363. Drives used to have a jumper to pretend to only talk 150, for controllers that didn't deal well with 300. But as far as I know there isn't any way to get the 600 drives to pretend to be only 150 or 300. Issue: if a port has a problem (flaky disk or whatever), siis(4) may do a bunch of DELAY(big number) which interferes with other hardware doing real-time data logging, causing data to be lost. Unacceptable. Does not require power cycle though. I don't recall it even needing a reboot. That doesn't sound good, but I guess somebody can tell me the issues of any controller or driver that comes up in this discussion. If you're OK with siis despite this, I should too. It isn't acceptable, but I've had similar/identical problems with ata(4) and ahci(4). For all I know maybe all the disk drivers do it. I think the problem is keeping interrupts off for too long. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: UEFI Secure Boot Specs - And some sanity
grarpamp writes: Plenty of millionaires out there now who are in tune with opensource who could startup, buy the same ARM/ATOM/etc chips, the same support chips, load Android and sell it to the masses. Would you please post a list of these millionaire FLOSS entrepreneurs? Thank you. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: ahcich Timeouts SATA SSD
SSD are connected to on-board SATA port on motherboard Presumably to controllers provided by the Intel Tylersburg 5520 chipset. This system was commissioned in February of 2012 and ran without issue as a ZFS backup system on our network until about 3 weeks ago. The system is dual PSU behind a UPS so I don't think that this is an issue. No changes? e.g. no added hardware to increase power load. Overloading the power supply and/or the wiring (with too many splitters) can result in flaky problems like this. OS will respond to ping requests after the issue and if you have an active SSH session you will remain connected to the system until you attempt to do something like 'ls', 'ps', etc. I am not able to drop into DDB when the issue happens as the system is locked up completely. Could be a failure on my part to understand/engage in how to do this, will try if the issue happens again (should on Wednesday AM unless setting camcontrol apm to off for the disks somehow fixes the issue). If the system is alive enough to respond to ping, I'd expect you should be able to get into DDB? Can you get into DDB when the system is working normally? 2 x Crucial M4 64 Gb SATA SSD for FreeBSD OS (zroot) 2 x Intel 320 MLC 80 Gb SATA SSD for L2ARC and swap I ran the Crucial firmware update ISO and it did not see any firmware updates as necessary on the SSD disks. Does the problem happen with both the Crucial and the Intel SSDs? If software I agree that it would not make sense that this would suddenly pop-up after months of operation with no issues. If something causes the software/firmware to take a different path, new issues can appear. E.g. error handling or even timing. Infrequently used code paths might not have been tested sufficiently. Does the controller have firmware? Part of the BIOS I suppose. Is there a BIOS update available? Have you considered connecting the SSDs to a different controller? the on-board AHCI portion of the BIOS does not always see the disks after the event without a hard system power reset. That's at least one bug somewhere, probably the hardware isn't getting reset properly. Does Supermicro know about this bug? I have 48 Gb of Crucial memory that I will put in this system today to replace the 24 Gb or so of Kingston memory I have in the system. Which in addition to being different memory, should reduce swap activity. Suggestion: move everything to conventional drives. Keep at least one SSD connected to system, but normally unused. Now you can beat on the SSD in a controlled manner to debug the problem. Does reading trigger the problem? Writing? Try dd with different blocksizes, accessing multiple SSDs at once, etc. I have to wonder if there is a timing problem, or missing interrupt, or... * Ditch FreeBSD for Solaris so I can keep ZFS lovin for the intended purpose of this system If it fails with FreeBSD but works with Solaris on the same hardware, then it is almost certainly a problem with the device driver. (Or at least a problem that Solaris has a workaround for.) ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: FreeBSD on RaspberryPi
If someone knows how to get the video out to work, I'm very interested! Technically, there is a fully open-source graphics stack. The bad news is that they moved the functionality into the binary-only firmware, which makes fixing bugs a bit more difficult. I haven't hunted down the actual code, much less looked at it, but if all the functionality is in the firmware, there shouldn't be much code that needs to be ported to BSD. The good news: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=MTIxNDY The bad news: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=MTIxNDk ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Seeking BSD friendly video card
Seeking a video card that is completely documented and is fully supported (with source code) by the BSDs. A gpu-less framebuffer is fine. (No videogaming) PCIe At least 2560x1440 (for 27 displays) (analog can be lower resolution) 2560x1600 (30 displays) would be better 4096x2560 (4K displays) would be even better At least 24 bit color (more is better) Work as console for firmware and OS. Must work with X11. Bonus points for multiple heads (e.g. 2 digital + 1 analog) Bonus points for each type of port supported (dvi, hdmi, displayport, vga, s-video, ...) Bonus points for video decoder that is documented and fully supported by the BSDs. Minor bonus points for a small, energy efficient gpu that is documented and fully supported by the BSDs. Bonus points for not even needing a heatsink. Major minus points for power hungry monsters with jet engine fans and extra power cables, double-wide, ... Binary-only is unacceptable, must have source. (Can be BSDL, GPL, ...) Bonus points for supporting sync-on-green. Decent quality. Full height is ok, doesn't need to be low profile. Are there any other issues I should consider? ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
OGP needs a wiki maintainer
The Open Graphics Project is designing a video card that is completely documented and FLOSS-friendly. We need someone to maintain our wiki. This is a volunteer (unpaid) job, but would look great on your resume/cv, and is a way for someone with software skills to help create open hardware. The server resources are being donated. The wiki has been crashing the server, forcing the owner to close the wiki until we can get a new maintainer. Other talent is also welcome, such as device driver writers, simulator writers, hardware design, etc. OGP mailing list (usually low volume): http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Reset Problem with SATA Port Multiplier
Drives: 45 * Seagate Altos ST3000NC002 Port Multipliers: 9 * SiI3826 SATA Controller: 3 * Marvell 88SX7042 After a few hours of a database-like workload over ZFS (NCQ enable, disk write caches disabled), a disk becomes unresponsive (we think due to a drive firmware problem): I have an 8.2 machine with Sil3132 controllers with Sil3726 pm with variety of drives. I have been getting the Timeout on slot small integer followed by lost device. Sometimes the device reappears. (Although the /dev/ufs/label does *not* reappear. :-( ) I have not seen the other drives on the pm get removed, or had to power cycle to recover. Seagate ST3000DM001 with CC4B firmware seems especially bad. ST3000DM001 with CC24 firmware have been ok. So your theory that the drive firmware has a problem seems promising. Sounds like FreeBSD is doing something bad to the pm, which Linux isn't doing. Perhaps log the commands the OS sends to the controller (over the network to a 2nd machine, or to a local disk not on a pm) and compare BSD to Linux? Perhaps start logging when you get the first timeout, to save hours of commands to wade through. Alternately you could stare at the driver sources until enlightenment occurs. AFAIK FreeBSD has never gotten a proper workaround for the quirk in the 1st generation Sil sata controllers, while they run fine on NetBSD. There might be a bug/quirk in the pm's firmware that FreeBSD triggers but Linus doesn't. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Reset Problem with SATA Port Multiplier
Bob writes: After a few hours of a database-like workload A faster way to trigger the problem would be useful. We're actually more interested in archive type workloads than this database workload and we have not observed the problem with an archive workload. So perhaps something about the timing triggers the bug? Sam writes if you have a script or a way to build a kernel to help debug this I will run it if you post it here... I have the same issue on a 3 port multiplier using -HEAD Can you share the make and model of this 3 port multiplier? If it is happening with more than one model of pm, it is more likely some generic problem, rather than triggering some model-specific quirk/bug. Has anyone seen this problem with an older OS release? (say 7.x or 8.x?) If the problem was introduced recently, we might be able to find it by looking at what changed in the source code. I haven't seen the problem with 8.2 or earlier. Looks like a verbose boot will give a little more info. But I suspect that adding more log(9) statements will be needed. Unless mav has a better idea? ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Getting documentation. ( Was [...] SATA Port Multiplier)
Willem writes: Marvell is among the hardest to get the stuff from. One wonders how they expect to sell parts? Perhaps this is somethings you could also do for this problem. Find a coorperative PM board manufacturer, and bigback on their support with the promise to support their PM boards in FreeBSD. Motivation for them would have to be that there could be a sales advantage in selling PM boards to FreeBSDers. And given that we advertise that ZFS does not need complex/expensive RAID controllers will increase the usage of more simple devices. IIUC we have software RAID, thus we don't need complex/expensive RAID controllers regardless of fs. Don't the various BSDs mostly use the same drivers? Perhaps we could promise sales for Dragon/Open/Net as well as FreeBSD? Otehr way about it would be to involve the FreeBSD foundation, and get them to do the legal part of the stuff as a umbrella for the developers, and then delegate (again under NDA) work to developers that want to work on Marvell stuff. Sounds promising. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Inexpensive PCI SATA, anyone?
I'm quite content with all other parts of the box, but controller is VERY slow. Can anyone recommend me inexpensive and reasonably fast PCI SATA with 2-4 ports? According to dmidecode, the box has PCI-E slot, x4 PCI Express, long. Note that PCI and PCI Express are different. JMicron JMB363 chipset: NCQ SATA-300 PATA-133 hotplug port multiplier 2 SATA ports + 1 PATA channel works on FreeBSD, ahci(4) driver, NCQ works, port multiplier works, PATA works needs PCIe-x1 slot Silicon Image 3132 chipset: NCQ SATA-300 hotplug port multiplier 2 SATA ports works on FreeBSD, siis(4) driver, NCQ works, port multiplier works needs PCIe-x1 slot Some cards with a single 363 or 3132 chip claim 4 ports, but mean 2 ports with 4 connectors (2 internal and 2 external). You set jumpers to select which connectors are active. Silicon Image 3124 chipset: 4 ports (4 real ports) There are at least two types of cards with 3124: (1) needs PCI-X slot (wide PCI slot, not to be confused with PCI-Express) or (2) needs PCIe-x1 slot (PCI-Express) A PCIe-x1 card should work fine in a PCI-x4 slot. 363 is a tad faster than 3132. However 363 has problems with some disks that 3132 works fine with. 3124 is said to be faster than 3132. None of these are blindingly fast by 2014 standards. Neither 363 nor 3132 can saturate PCIe-x1 bandwidth. I would hope that 3124 can? There is also a EX-3508 card. 8 ports, PCIe-x1, no raid, sil3132 8 ports would need either 4 3232 chips or a port multiplier. Photo at www.exsys.ch but I can't make out the chip numbers and I don't see 4 chips that are the same size. Sellers appear to all be in Europe, I didn't find any sellers in USA. (I wasn't looking for sellers in Russia.) Anyone know anything about this card? (or similar cards?) The 3132 and 3124 are second generation chips. Note that the first generation Silicon Image chips are very very slow, and as far as I know, FreeBSD still doesn't support them properly. (They work fine on NetBSD. Very slow, but at least they work correctly there.) ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
sata port multiplier recommendations?
I have a couple of the SII3726 sata port multipliers, and they have been working fairly well, but one of them appears to be dying fast. Looking around, I see that they are finally making PMs that claim to do sata-3 speeds. Do any of these work well with BSD? Any to avoid? Is it safe to assume that they work ok with sata-2 controllers? (until I get a newer faster controller) Needs to support NCQ, hotplug, FIS, ... ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
cpu/mainboard recommendations?
Current machine is getting flakier by the day (hour?), I need to get a new one before something vital dies altogether. want list: non-inthell ecc smp (4 is probably about right) lots of sata ports (with NCQ, PM(FIS), hotplug, ...), sata3 if possible 1 or 2 PCI slots would be good, the remainder PCIe (v3 if possible) more than 7 slots would be great console can be rs-232 (multiple rs-232 ports would be good) floss firmware; dual-bios, socketed, or some failsafe gpu can drive 4k display, displayport would be nice usb3 (in case anyone ever makes a decent usb-sata bridge) firewire that actually works with bsd (as opposed to via) gig-ethernet (2 if possible) If AMD's Kaveri had ecc I would have gotten one months ago. Berlin should have most of this, but will AMD ever release it? Berlin was supposed to be out in first half of 2014, where is it? At this point I can't keep waiting for Berlin. So Phenom II? Bulldozer/Piledriver? The ARM stuff is still fairly slow, correct? Anything else worth considering? I'll probably try 2 or 3 of the BSDs, but no penguinix, no microshit, no gaming, no overclocking, no watercooling. Need a reasonably fast cpu (not looking for warp factor 8, warp 2 will be fine), lots of i/o, and very reliable. Don't need an over-the-top gpu. Enough resolution and color depth, fast enough to display video properly. Ability to offload video decoding would be nice. ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Zoned Commands ZBC/ZAC, Shingled SMR drives, ZFS
You can also find these drives inside the STDT8000100 external USB unit for a bit more at $300. It may or may not be the same. There are stories that it is difficult or impossible to talk directly to the drives in recent USB units without the usb-to-sata bridge. I have yet to find a usb-to-sata bridge that doesn't have problems. Is the price predicted to go down further in the future? Disk prices were going down nicely until the great flood. Prices took over a year to return to pre-flood levels, and have been dropping *very* slowly since. The MA activity reduced competition, which doesn't help. Governments can't be bothered to prohibit anticompetitive MA activity. Increases in capacity per drive have slowed, perhaps due to the same reduction in competition. 3TB drives have been the best value in TB/$ for nearly 4 years. I bought some 3TB drives last month for $84.99 each (with free shipping). At the same TB/$ an 8TB drive should cost $226.64, and a 10TB drive should cost $283.30. The penguins added a new device manipulation library to support ZBC/ZAC. There might be things to learn there (mistakes to avoid?). http://www.zdnet.com/article/hgst-gets-closer-to-shipping-10tb-hdd/ ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
PCIe to USB to PCIe
A very small PCIe x1 card with USB 3.0 controller, a USB cable, and a small pcb with a PCIe x16 slot. Intended to allow using x16 video cards with x1 slots, and reducing power/space/cooling demands on mainboard. Claim: "No Driver necessary" Can these things possibly work? If they do, it seems to me that this would be a great way to add additional general purpose PCIe slots to any computer that has USB ports, which nearly all do these days. If no driver is needed, they should work with any OS. Obviously there is a speed limitation, but many applications can live with that. Sounds too good to be true. Am I missing something? http://kaishijia.en.alibaba.com/product/1869213364-221855851/PCIE_PCI_E_Riser_Card_to_USB3_0_and_SATA_Power_Cable_with_PCB_Board_for_Bitcoin_Machine.html More here: http://kaishijia.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-221855851/Bitcoin_Mining_cables.html ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
ECC support
Many of AMD's CPU/APU parts support ECC memory. Not just the top of the line parts, but also many of the less expensive, less power hungry parts. However, many (most?) of the boards for these chips do not support ECC, or at least do not admit to it. They specify "non-ECC memory". Obviously there have to be connections between the memory controller and the memory for the extra bits. Aside from a little extra time for the board designer to add a few traces to the wire list, this would not raise the cost of the board. Despite this I have read that some boards lack the necessary traces. Does the firmware have to do anything to support ECC? Program a few registers in the memory controller perhaps? A few boards have FLOSS firmware available, so this code could be added, but most boards do not have firmware sources available. Assuming that a board does have the necessary connections but the firmware does not have ECC support, is there some reason that ECC support could not be added to the OS instead of the firmware? I grepped through FreeBSD 8.2 and 10.1 sources but couldn't find anything that looked relevant. Also did not find any code that reported ECC errors, other than one device. Perhaps I missed it? I've been running machines with ECC for 15-20 years and have never seen a report of an ECC error from either NetBSD or FreeBSD. I have seen reports of ECC errors from Digital Unix. And remember getting panics due to parity errors on machines before ECC. So I'm thinking that the BSDs must ignore hardware reports of single bit ECC errors. :-( ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: ECC support
Andriy: >> Assuming that a board does have the necessary connections but >> the firmware does not have ECC support, is there some reason that >> ECC support could not be added to the OS instead of the firmware? > > Yes, there is. The memory controller is programmed by the code that > runs from ROM and uses no RAM (or the CPU cache is used as the RAM). > Once the real RAM gets used it's too late to reprogram the DRAM controller. Perhaps one of the several bootloader stages could get itelf into CPU cache, program the memory controller, then load and execute the next stage or the OS? Jim: > Replacing the data in memory would require processing overhead > that could accumulate and significantly diminish system performance. If it only replaces data when there is a correctable error, and the errors are occasional soft errors, the effect on performance should be minimal. If there is a hard error, you would want to replace the defective memory before you get an additional error and it becomes uncorrectable. > If the error occurred because of random events and isn't a defect in > the memory, the memory address will be cleaned of the error when the > data is overwritten with other data. If and when new data gets written to that location. If that location contains info that never changes, such as kernel text, the bad bit will never get fixed. > memory, without the extra complexity of the controller, is 12.5% more > expensive. This <80><99>t a huge impact at 8GB, (<80><99>ll need > another 1GB of RAM), but at 1024GB <80><99>ll need another 128GB, > and that much ram still costs enough that your wallet <80><99>t be happy. It is 12.5% in both cases. How much does it cost to have undetected errors in your data? How much does it cost when an Interstate bridge collapses? How much does it cost when one of NASA's missions fails? How much does it cost when your pharmacy receives a prescription with an error in the dose? > the MRC setup on Intel and AMD is both complex and proprietary One wonders why the secrecy. AMD has been much more open than many (most?) chipmakers. They even forced the ATI people to document how to program their chips. I don't see a lot of companies popping up making competing chips. #include standard joke: "How do you make a small fortune in chipmaking? Start with a very large fortune." I can't see what secret would be revealed by saying "set bit 7 of register 4 to 1 to enable ECC". > Intel Red Book So the secret books are red this week, yawn. I remember the nightmare of the merced orange books and the brain damaged "features" the chips had. Not recommended. I'm interested in chips that work correctly, hence the interest in ECC and AMD. Looked for ARM boards with ECC but didn't find any. Is the Sparc stuff any more reliable than it used to be? Other arch choices? > The MRC setup code is a binary blob for otherwise open source boot > firmware such as Coreboot. So the libreboot people are forced to work on reverse engineering these blobs? :-( Don: > I don't think the current APU parts support ECC. According to wikipedia, socket FM2+ does not support ECC. :-( Kabini has support for ECC. And Berlin, (and I assume Toronto) but word is that Berlin and Toronto are basically dead. :-( I think Carrizo and Turion are supposed to support ECC? There really ought to be a list of which CPUs/APUs/sockets/boards do or do not support ECC. > My experience is that many ASUS motherboard support ECC RAM and > usually document that fact. Also many Gigabyte mother boards also > support ECC RAM, but don't document it. >From what I've been reading, both Asus and Gigabyte make good boards. I've seen reviews that complained about Gigabyte's firmware. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/gigabyte-ga-990fxa-ud5_8.html I've also seen claims that the firmware bricked boards. Reviewers like Asus' firmware. I've seen complaints about Asus's support, and their website has significant problems. The firmware on my Tyan board is crap, and they refused to tell me how much power it needs. Which means I don't know how much other stuff I can run from the same P/S. It should have *way* more power than needed, but experience says "not enough", so I added a 2nd p/s for the disk farm and suddenly had fewer problems. The 2 p/s setup does allow powercycling the mainboard (because of the crappy firmware) without powercycling the disks. Given my experience with the Tyan board, and the apparent lack of FLOSS firmware for recent boards, I'm not real excited about the Gigabyte boards. Asus has a couple of AMD3+ boards that I could probably live with, if their website actually had things like lists of exactly which CPUs and memory are approved, and firmware updates, ... But there are also applications could use a lower wattage solution. Anyone have opinions on other mainboard companies? ECS? Asrock? MSI? Zotac? Others? Don: > +MCA: Bank 4, Status 0x944a400096080a13 > +MCA: Global Cap
PCIe multipliers, how do they work?
Looking into ways to get additional expansion slots, since board designers cannot count past 7 and often not even that high. :-( There are PCIe riser cards that split a wide slot into 2 or more narrower slots, for example 1 x8 slot becomes 2 x4 slots. These would be very useful, except it appears that they require "bifurcation" support in the mainboard's firmware. Which most boards do not provide. And most boards are not supported by FLOSS firmware, so adding bifurcation support would be rather difficult. There are also PCIe cards which provide multiple slots, typically connected with a usb cable. These tend to convert 1 PCIe_x1 slot into multiple PCIe_x1 slots. I get the impression that these do not require bifurcation support. They seem to be aimed at "miners" for attaching multiple gpu cards. I'm not interested in mining or in attaching multiple gpu cards. I'm interesting in adding additional sata cards, Ethernet cards, and such. Unlike the bifurcation type riser splitter cards, which seem to conserve PCIe lanes, these are more like a sata port multiplier, with the same type of bandwidth limitation. I'm wondering how these things work. The wikipedia PCIe page [1] says: "PCI Express switches can create multiple endpoints out of one endpoint to allow sharing one endpoint with multiple devices." So maybe they use a PCIe switch? Poking around wikipedia and google has thus far uncovered very little info about PCIe switches. Wikipedia is less helpful than usual, and they keep making google less and less useful for no apparent reason. I don't see any other obvious keywords to google for. It isn't obvious how slot id/address is handled. How do commands and data get routed to/from the correct card? Is any firmware or OS support required? Is there some other solution that I haven't stumbled across? I'd really like to split an x8 slot into 4 x2 slots, which doesn't seem to be an off-the-shelf option either way. [1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
