potential initialisation problem in the aic94xx

potential initialisation problem in the aic94xx

[James Bottomley]

I'm not sure if this is a genuine problem, or I just happen to have a
broken card:  Since the card is unusual in being keyed 3.3v only, I
don't actually have any working x86 machine I can try it in.

The symptoms I see on my ia64 box are that as soon as the driver tries
to touch the Region 0 BAR via mmio, the system gives me a MCE.  This is
probably because the card fails to respond on this address and thus
gives some type of PCI bus timeout.  My suspicion is that the card
requires some firmware setup that the on-board BIOS does before the BARs
respond (and since this is an ia64 box, it doesn't run the BIOS).  Could
someone (i.e. Jeff) with access to the Docs have a look and see if this
suspicion can be verified (or someone with a card try it in an ia64 to
see if the same symptoms are observed)?

Thanks,

James

Re: potential initialisation problem in the aic94xx

[James Bottomley]

On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 15:52 -0600, James Bottomley wrote:
> I'm not sure if this is a genuine problem, or I just happen to have a
> broken card:  Since the card is unusual in being keyed 3.3v only, I
> don't actually have any working x86 machine I can try it in.

OK, I am sure now.  I've found an x86_64 machine with 3.3v slots and
verified that this card does work.

Therefore, we have a serious bug in the aic94xx driver init code.  It's
clearly relying on something to set it up correctly in the BIOS rather
than doing everything in the driver init routine.  This means (unless
corrected) that the card will only work on x86 like platforms.

James

Re: potential initialisation problem in the aic94xx

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 11:22:13PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> Therefore, we have a serious bug in the aic94xx driver init code.  It's
> clearly relying on something to set it up correctly in the BIOS rather
> than doing everything in the driver init routine.  This means (unless
> corrected) that the card will only work on x86 like platforms.

... and it won't work when hotplugged, even on an x86 platform.