I remember a similar pb with an AOC-SAT2-MV8 controller in a system of mine: Solaris rebooted each time the marvell88sx driver tried to detect the disks attached to it. I don't remember if happened during installation, or during the first boot after a successful install. I ended up spending a night reverse engineering the controller's firmware/BIOS to find and fix the bug. The system has been running fine since I reflashed the controller with my patched firmware.
To make a long story short, a lot of these controllers in the wild use a buggy firmware, version 1.0b [1]. During POST the controller's firmware scans the PCI bus to find the device it is supposed to initialize, ie the controller's Marvell 88SX6081 chip. It incorrectly assumes that the *first* device with one of these PCI device IDs is the 88SX6081: 5040 5041 5080 5081 6041 6042 6081 7042 (the firmware is generic and supposed to support different chips). My system's motherboard happened to have an Marvell chip 88SX5041 onboard (device ID 5041) which was found first. So during POST the AOC-SAT2-MV8 firmware was initializing disks connected to the 5041, leaving the 6081 disks in an uninitialized stat. Then after POST when Solaris was booting, I guess the marvell88sx barfed on this unexpected state and was causing the kernel to reboot. To fix the bug, I simply patched the firmware to remove 5041 from the device ID list. I used the Supermicro-provided tool to reflash the firmware [1]. You said your motherboard is a Supermicro H8DM8E-2. There is no such model, do you mean H8DM8-2 or H8DME-2 ?. To determine whether one of your PCI devices has one of the device IDs I mentionned, run: $ /usr/X11/bin/scanpci I have recently had to replace this AOC-SAT2-MV8 controller with another one (we accidentally broke a SATA connector during a maintainance operation). Its firmware version is using a totally different numbering scheme (it's probably more recent) and it worked right out-of-the-box on the same motherboard. So it looks like Marvell or Supermicro fixed the bug in at least some later revisions of the AOC-SAT2-MV8. But they don't distribute this newer firmware on their FTP site. Do you know if yours is using firmware 1.0b (displayed during POST) ? [1] ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/Firmware/AOC-SAT2-MV8 _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
