From: basile@soleil.serma.cea.fr (Basile STARYNKEVITCH) Subject: Advice about UltraStor34F on Linux (maybe volunteering to debug) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1993 14:12:47 GMT
In article <20ck0g$49s@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>, jfc@athena.mit.edu
(John F Carr) said that he gave up trying making a reliable UltraStor
device driver for Linux. The problem is very visible on some PCs
(quoting John: "you'll get a screenfull of kernel errors and all SCSI
devices will hang"), but other PCs do run with it. I wish to thanks
John F Carr (and others) for having tried making it work.
Unfortunately for me, i bought 20 days ago, at my home, a brand new PC
(with an Orchid 486DX2/66 VLB motherboard with AmiBios, 16Mb RAM,
ET4000 VLB video card, UltraStor 34F SCSI VLB controller, Quantun 240MB
SCSI hard disk, Archive Viper Qic-150 streamer).
I never managed to install Linux (from SLS distribution, or from a
special UltraStor specific boot image) on my PC, with the same bug John
describes (and NMI recieved when accessing the UltraStor 34F). MSDOS
recognizes and runs it ok but i do not want to run MessyLoss, just
Linux!!! I suspected a hardware problem, and did have change my
UltraStor34F card, without success. I've observed that some Bios
settings make things worse.
I've noticed that the card seems to work bad on big Scsi accesses...
Specifically, fdisk runs usually ok (and i suppose it reads&writes
onlyt a few first sectors) but mke2fs bombs out... I also had problems
using only tape (with eg: dd if=/dev/rmt0 of=/dev/null bs=16k
count=5). Maybe it is the scather/gather stuff...
I may volunteer to debug the driver but would ask some advices (and
although i know some Unixes rather well, eg SunOS4,SunOS5,HPUX8; i'm
new to Linux):::
0. Do any people know what exactly is wrong with UltraStor 34F on some
PCs (John Carr reports that it is ok for other people & PCs)? I suspect
-without proofs it is just a feeling- a timing problem related to big
Scsi transfers (perhaps scatter/gather?)
1. Is debugging such a device driver doable without special hardware
devices (ie i have no oscilloscope, logical analyzer, etc)?
2. Is debugging such a device driver doable in not too much work (eg
less than 50hours -- and i will work on it only a few hours/week,
because i have a wife, 3 kids and a job)?
3. If i take debugging it, do some peaple have detailled information
(including hardware & register level) of th UltraStor 34F board?
4. Is a 40Mb or 80Mb cheap (eg Conner) IDE hard disk enough for
kernel&driver debugging?
5. Are there good reasons to definitely give up supporting UltraStor34F
on Linux?
6. If i give up debugging the UltraStor34F, i will have to buy a cheap
Scsi controller. I can't afford buying one that won't work, and i
don't have any more much money to spend. Is the Adaptec 1542 ok, or are
there some configurations where it does not work?
This is not a promise to take ultrastor34F driver debugging; i'm just
seeking advice for making a decision... I also want to help on Linux,
but i wish to have my machine work!.