Re: AWACS Bug

Re: AWACS Bug

[Trevor Woerner]

Hi Russell,

>it happens when I try to backspace too much
>at the prompt, or lately when I try to come out of X (using AfterStep)
>back into the shell...I tried the user support list, and they suggested
>that I ask the developers if they knew anything. So,
>Do you know of what could be causing this, or how I should try to fix
>it?

this is REALLY off the top of my head and just a suggestion. i have
no idea how the kernel works, or how the sound works, or how the kernel
interracts with the sound, so i have no clue how/if this'll work.

anyway, when you're in X why don't you try a:

    user# xset b off

(where "user#" is your prompt). i don't like a computer that beeps
and boops at me so i put this in my .xinitrc (or was it my .fvwm2rc?)
anyway, instead of beeping the console will flash (i.e. no beep)

xset takes a number of parameters (one of which is required to get the
mouse to track at a decent rate) to allow you to adjust a number of
things about your environment. on of the things you can change is the
bell setting. the command above turns the bell off.

give it a whirl, tell us what happens!

best regards,
    trevor woerner


------------------------------------------------------------

...and now, ladies and gentelmen, for your entertainment
   the band will play "Somewhere My Love Lies Sleeping"
   with a male chorus...

                             --- Groucho Marx


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Re: AWACS Bug

[Scott Sams]

Thank you for the helpful information. However, neither of the tricks
you suggested helped me. Is it possible to damage the AWACS chip on the
motherboard (maybe by an electrical surge?) and still have the machine
run? 

I guess I will have to install a new card. Do you know of any other PCI
sound cards that work under linuxppc on a powermac?

Thanks,

Scott

Jason Y. Sproul wrote:
> 
> Have you tried a motherboard reset and/or powerdown? For the former, you
> have to locate the reset switch on the motherboard - should be near the
> battery. For the latter, you have to yank the backup battery on the
> motherboard and leave it out and the machine unconnected to *anything* for
> at least four hours. (Overnight is preferable.) I've seen Macs get wedged
> badly enough that an mboard powerdown and a few hits of the reset were
> necessary to flush everything. Developing PCI cards isn't always fun...
> 
> ........................................................................
> Jason Y. Sproul                    http://www.con.wesleyan.edu/~jsproul/
> jsproul@wesleyan.edu            jsproul@iced.com    http://www.iced.com/
>      Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

-- 
 ____ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~      Scott Sams         
(____  _  _-|-|-                    sbsams@eos.ncsu.edu      
_____)(__(_)| |        http://www.catt.ncsu.edu/~sbsams
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Re: AWACS Bug

[Jason Y. Sproul]

On Thu, 27 May 1999, Scott Sams wrote:

> Thank you for the helpful information. However, neither of the tricks
> you suggested helped me.

Wow... That sounds rather hard-core.

> Is it possible to damage the AWACS chip on the motherboard (maybe by an
> electrical surge?) and still have the machine run?

I suppose so, although it would almost certainly have to come from a source
other than the motherboard that could create a voltage across just the
AWACS without also toasting other components. Highly improbable. A simple
statistical failure of the chip itself is more likely than that, though a
short in the connections to the various outputs is possible too.

1. You mentioned checking the ports. There should be fuses on all of them,
in theory, as well as the speaker lines. Fuses burn out.

2. Instrument the AWACS driver heavily with printk()s and see if the
various settings of the control registers are actually working, or if the
chip is a total zombie.

3. If you've got a voltmeter (or, in a perfect world, an oscilloscope) try
watching the various output lines as you play sounds. Single frequencies
are best if you've got an oscilloscope that'll trigger on them. If there's
a signal there, you can probably trace the failure to another component
that might be replaceable with a bit of surgery. (Amplifier, pull-up
resistor, capacitor, wiring, something like that.) Work backwards from the
output port contacts towards the AWACS using the port specs in your user's
guide technical appendix. I assume that the AWACS clocks from the bus, but
you might want to make sure there's not an associated clock that's gone
dead. Try not to short out your entire motherboard in the process.

If the above all fail, you're probably SOL.

> I guess I will have to install a new card. Do you know of any other PCI
> sound cards that work under linuxppc on a powermac?

Not offhand. I've been meaning to explore this, but I've already got too
much going on just now. :^)

........................................................................
Jason Y. Sproul                    http://www.con.wesleyan.edu/~jsproul/
jsproul@wesleyan.edu        jsproul@iced.com        http://www.iced.com/
     Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.


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Re: AWACS Bug

[Scott Sams]

Paul Mackerras <paulus@cs.anu.edu.au> wrote:

> What's happening is I think the same as what happens on the iMac: when
> you run the BootX app to boot linux, and it asks macos to shut down,
> macos shuts down the awacs, in such a fashion that the only thing that
> will start it up again is a hard reset. :-( 

I believe the same thing has happened on my box, although a hardware
reset has yet to fix the problem! :-<

Sound does not come out of either the internal speaker, or the line out
jack. Playing a .wav or a CD produces no sound. MacOS will not play any
sounds too. I have tried everything from hard resets to power cycling to
zapping the PRAM 3 times, and nothing has brought my sound back. Do any
of you hardware gurus out there know if it is possible to manually reset
the AWACS chip? Does this mean I fried my AWACS chip? How could I
replace it if necessary? Please help.

Thanks,

Scott Sams

-- 
 ____ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~      Scott Sams         
(____  _  _-|-|-                    sbsams@eos.ncsu.edu      
_____)(__(_)| |        http://www.catt.ncsu.edu/~sbsams
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Re: AWACS Bug

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Mon, May 24, 1999, Scott Sams <sbsams@eos.ncsu.edu> wrote:

>Paul Mackerras <paulus@cs.anu.edu.au> wrote:
>
>> What's happening is I think the same as what happens on the iMac: when
>> you run the BootX app to boot linux, and it asks macos to shut down,
>> macos shuts down the awacs, in such a fashion that the only thing that
>> will start it up again is a hard reset. :-( 

I do have a fix for that but this fix is still not tested and not in
BootX. I'll try to find some time to finish sometimes this week. (The fix
is a hack: I patch the MacOS burgundy driver to prevent the shutdown.
Also this works only with versions of the driver that do export their
function names thru the TOC, which may not be the case of future versions).


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AWACS Bug

[Russell Hires]

For some reason AWACS is causing Linux to crash. Here's the error
message I get: AWACS: error, status 4f40da9. I have a G3/266, which I
bought in late November 1998. 64 MB RAM, 6MB VRAM, DVD-ROM, 4 G SCSI HD
that runs Linux on 1.5 G partition (which is, of course, divided up into
/usr and so on...)  using the 2.2pre9 kernel (final).

About my crashes: it seems to happen when I use BootX the Application,
and not
BootX the Extension. Also, it happens when I try to backspace too much
at the prompt, or lately when I try to come out of X (using AfterStep)
back into the shell...I tried the user support list, and they suggested
that I ask the developers if they knew anything. So,
Do you know of what could be causing this, or how I should try to fix
it?

Russell Hires


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Re: AWACS Bug

[Paul Mackerras]

Russell Hires <inet2@akos.net> wrote:

> For some reason AWACS is causing Linux to crash. Here's the error
> message I get: AWACS: error, status 4f40da9. I have a G3/266, which I
> bought in late November 1998. 64 MB RAM, 6MB VRAM, DVD-ROM, 4 G SCSI HD
> that runs Linux on 1.5 G partition (which is, of course, divided up into
> /usr and so on...)  using the 2.2pre9 kernel (final).
> 
> About my crashes: it seems to happen when I use BootX the Application,
> and not
> BootX the Extension. Also, it happens when I try to backspace too much

What's happening is I think the same as what happens on the iMac: when
you run the BootX app to boot linux, and it asks macos to shut down,
macos shuts down the awacs, in such a fashion that the only thing that
will start it up again is a hard reset. :-(  If you do

     cat /proc/device-tree/pci/mac-io/davbus/awacs/compatible

and you see a string including "burgundy", that's the problem.

I have managed to work out quite a bit about the burgundy so far.
Its registers can be read as well as written, unlike the earlier
awacses, which makes it much easier to work out what macos is doing.
Shortly I expect to have a new dmasound.c which will support the
burgundy properly.

Paul.

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