AEC62XX Driver: Can ANYONE Help!?

[Alexander Holst]

On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 22:40,
yellowdog-general-request at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com wrote:

> Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 13:04:34 -0800
> From: four of six defective <4_of_6_defective at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: AEC62XX Driver: Can ANYONE Help!?
> 
> If it is a Rev A g3 you may have a problem.
> I have one and have not been able to change any
> hardware other than the cd drive.  It has been nothing
> but trouble.  In fact I am about to put it out to pasture.

See below ;) - I assume some defective hardware ...

> Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 14:48:27 -0700 (MST)
> From: Corbett Battaile <ccb at ydl.net>
> Subject: Re: AEC62XX Driver: Can ANYONE Help!?
> 
> Turns out PART of my problems were indeed my fault.
> The AEC6280M is still broke, but I managed to get the PDC20269 to work
> once I realized that I had jumpered the drives for "Master, with
> slave" rather than "Master, single drive." Doh! While I can access the
> drives using the Promise card, I do get occasional errors like:
>         dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
> Anyone know if this warrants concern, especially given that the
> machines are intended to be file servers?

Hi everybody,

I do have a beige G3/233 DT Rev. A and have a Promise Ultra100 Tx2 PCI
card in it. As a matter of fact, it _is_ working very well with the
stock kernels that came with YDL 3.0 and 3.0.1. My Linux drive is
attached to the Promise controller, and I am currently writing this
email on it ;)

I also have two PM7500/100 at work with the same Promise controllers
running YDL 3.0.1 as well. Also no problems there. The only caveat is
that neither Mac OS9 nor Mac OSX see the drives attached to the
controller, so one cannot boot directly off a drive attaced to the
controller. Maybe it presents itself to OpenFirmware though, then one
should be able to type the full OF path to a kernel manually and boot. I
have never investigated into that though.

As for the "dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }" errors, I
also ran into them. A search on a mailinglist reagarding Promise
controllers suggested to turn off DMA (as discussed earlier in this
thread) with "hdparam -d0 /dev/hdx". The errors stop after that.

I added the following line to my rc.sysinit as the first line:
/sbin/hdparm -d0 /dev/hda

All three described systems have all Linux partitions on drives attached
to the Promise controllers and are running extremely stable - one of the
7500s is our firewall / DNS and has uptimes way over 150 days regularly.
I do have the feeling though that disabling DMA reduces performance on
the drives. Although it is a Ultra100 card in combination with
WesternDigital IDE100 drives, it seems that the drive attached to the
onboard IDE33 controller of my beige G3 seems to be faster :( According
to the boot log, it uses MultiWord DMA - therefore I wouldn't specify to
not use DMA by passing "ide=nodma" to the kernel it might prevent all
drives from using DMA.

from dmesg:

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta4-2.4
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with
idebus=xx
PDC20268: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:0e.0
PDC20268: chipset revision 2
PDC20268: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20268: ROM enabled at 0x81804000
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x0800-0x0807, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0x0808-0x080f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio
ide2: Found Apple Heathrow ATA controller, bus ID 0
ide3: Found Apple Heathrow ATA controller, bus ID 1
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: WDC WD800JB-00CRA1, ATA DISK drive
Unhandled interrupt 18, disabled
blk: queue c034e020, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
Probing IDE interface ide1...
Probing IDE interface ide2...
hde: WDC AC24300L, ATA DISK drive
Unhandled interrupt d, disabled
hde: Enabling MultiWord DMA 2
Probing IDE interface ide3...
hdg: TEAC CD-W552D, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
Unhandled interrupt e, disabled
hdg: Enabling MultiWord DMA 2
ide0 at 0x840-0x847,0x832 on irq 24
ide2 at 0xd7905000-0xd7905007,0xd7905160 on irq 13
ide3 at 0xd7909000-0xd7909007,0xd7909160 on irq 14
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=155061/16/63,
UDMA(100)
hde: attached ide-disk driver.
hde: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hde: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hde: host protected area => 1
hde: 8421840 sectors (4312 MB) w/256KiB Cache, CHS=8912/15/63, (U)DMA
ide-cd: passing drive hdg to ide-scsi emulation.
hdg: attached ide-scsi driver.
Partition check:
 hda:hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
PDC202XX: Primary channel reset.
ide0: reset: success

As you can see, hda through hdd are handled by the PCI controller, hde
through hdh are handled by the Apple onboard chips. The "hda: dma_intr:
..." errors stop after rc.sysinit picks up. I wish I knew, how to set
the BIOS settings of the card without the use of an Intel based PC (I
have none). Maybe that would help in tuning the whole setup.

As for the nonoptimal transfer rates due to nonoptimal settings of the
BIOS of the card, I don't know how this would perform as a server. Other
than that, I am quite happy with all three systems.

Hope this helps the original poster of this thread and maybe rings a
bell for others to be able to tell me, how I can further optimze
performance on my systems, e.g. also get MultiWord DMA enabled on the
drives attached to the PCI controller ...

Greetings,
Alex



-- 
Alexander Holst
Hergulesse Design
ph: +49 [0]711 887 5195
fx: +49 [0]711 887 5196
<alex.holst [at] hergulesse [dot] de>