Re: Symbios Logic 53C876 detected as 53C875, then doesn't work

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

On Sat, Aug 12, 2006 at 01:24:15PM -0700, Chris Stromsoe wrote:
> I have two cards that detect as 0007 in the particular slot and one that 
> detects as 000f.  Moving a 0007 to a different slot detects it as 000f. 
> The slots are on a 64-bit pci riser card, so it's possible that there is a 
> bad connection on one of the fingers.  I'll try the boards in a different 
> machien and see it makes any difference.

Definitely sounds like dodgy connections.

> >I don't like the look of this.  If you're getting ffffffff back from 
> >those particular registers, the chip has clearly gone fatal.  But I use 
> >875 controllers *all the time*, so there's something odd going on here. 
> >I don't know what to suggest at this point, I'm afraid.
> 
> Whenever the cards are detected as 000f they have given me that error at 
> boot.  The cards came from Sun and are running Sun firmware if that makes 
> any difference at all.  Up until a week ago they were all functioning in a 
> couple of Sun E450 running Solaris 9 without any visible problems.

Actually, there's no firmware on the cards; the firmware is built into
the driver and uploaded to the onboard ram at initialisation time.

If there's dodgy connectors, then the card probably detected a PCI
parity error and went fatal.  I think it'd be useful to leverage the
PCI error recovery framework to at least display a useful error message
to the user on systems with little or no support for error *recovery*.