Hey Chris,
I've run OpenBSD (5.6, 5.7, 5.8) on a 5501 for a while with an off-brand
(Maxell?) 16GB card which supported UDMA for a couple years without issue. Do
you see DMA timing out at boot time and falling back to PIO in your dmesg
output? This was a common problem with the Geode SC1100 CPU (Soekris 4801 for
example), but I don't recall this on the 5501. If the card you have doesn't
support DMA, you can use config(8) to disable DMA with wd(4) which forces PIO
mode. I'm not aware of a way to make ComBIOS do this for you.
The link to the Sandisk card didn't work for me, but I've found the brand to be
generally reliable. Also, instead of dd'ing a potentially bad card to another
and expanding the filesystem, it might be faster and less error-prone to do a
fresh install on the new card and pull over your configs from the original one.
If you can, share your demsg output as it discovers the disk and I can fire my
machine up and we can compare if there's anything weird going on with the 5501
and/or the card itself.Cheers, Eric
From: Christopher Sean Hilton <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2016 10:02 AM
Subject: [Soekris] OpenBSD 6.0 on Soekris Net5501
Hi,
Experienced Soekris user looking for some quick advice. I'm trying to
test OpenBSD 6.0 on a Net5501 but the only CF cards I have are
off-brand. I think I'm being snake-bit by PIO/DMA reads into the
filesystem and of the kernel @ Boot. I have a SanDisk card which just
works but I'd like to preserve the data on it.
1) My plan is to use dd to preserve the image on the card and move
forward with it. But...
----------------
Can I safely expand the size card that I would use in a Net5501 to
around 16GB?
----------------
Does anyone have experience using these:
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-CompactFlash-Memory-SDCFHS-016G-G46
CF cards in Net5501 equipment or earlier? I've always had good luck
with SanDisk cards. These aren't out of proportion expensive like most
CF cards smaller than 32G these days. If anyone has a bad experience
with these cards in particular, I'll pass on them.
----------------
Am I missing something obvious with the latest OpenBSD boot chain
config that would allow me to turn on PIO for this machine. Or, since
I believe that the ComBIOS is actually handling the reads, is there a
way to force ComBIOS to use Port I/O rather than DMA? Or, am I missing
something else entirely?
Any help would be appreciated, Thanks!
-- Chris
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