Re: SuSE hwinfo/yast2 still confusing SYM53C8XX, killing tape backups (was: [BK PATCH] SCSI -rc1 fixes)

Steffen Winterfeldt
2004-11-22T10:35:31Z

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004, Matthias Andree wrote:

> James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com> writes:
>
> > Well, I think we're stuck on that one. SUSE doesn't seem willing to
> > debug hwscan enough to give a coherent description of the problem or a
> > non hwscan test case and no-one else wants to take hwscan apart to find
> > out exactly what it is doing.

Sorry for the late response; I'm just back from vacation.

> Steffen, SuSE's hwinfo package throws parity errors on SYM53C8xx
> hardware. Same issue with all kernels SuSE shipped for 9.1 including
> the current 2.6.5-7.111 kernel as well as vanilla 2.6.9.
> hwinfo-8.62-0.2. hotplugctl-0.08-256 - yet another undocumented piece of
> who-knows-what-its-good-for.
>
> Common trouble introduced by running yast2 or hwinfo is SCSI parity
> error, phase mismatch, bus reset and sometimes the machine going out to
> lunch for 2 minutes. It is unclear whether hwinfo probes the hardware
> directly, confusing the sym53c8xx, or uses some SCSI ioctl that confuses
> the adaptor. Please help finding _this_ out and if it's hwinfo hacking
> PCI registers directly, don't do that on ncr/sym/lsi53c8xx and 53c1010
> chips.

hwinfo is just a normal program and doesn't do any special tricks on
hardware. In particular, it issues an scsi inquiry command to get the serial
number, but that's about all.

If running just hwinfo breaks things for you, you might try running it
through strace and look at the files it accesses. Maybe that gives some hint
to narrow things down.

Steffen