Re: RELENG_7 hangs on boot w/Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H MB

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 08:05:33AM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 09:45:10AM -0500, Bob Willcox wrote:
On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 07:04:56AM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 08:24:29AM -0500, Bob Willcox wrote:
1) It would be helpful to know if you installed i386 or amd64 FreeBSD,

This is amd64 on this particular machine.

2) With regards to the lock-up after "mount root", if you press NumLock
or CapsLock, do the keyboard LEDs turn on/off?

Nope, no keys do anything. You must either push reset or pull the plug.

Is it possible to get the output when booting in verbose mode? If not,
what are the last few lines before the machine locks up when booting
verbosely?

Yep, just did that. The last things printed right before hang are:

ioapic0: Assigning ISA IRQ 1 to local APIC 0
ioapic0: Assigning ISA IRQ 4 to local APIC 1
ioapic0: Assigning ISA IRQ 6 to local APIC 2
ioapic0: Assigning ISA IRQ 7 to local APIC 0
ioapic0: Assigning ISA IRQ 9 to local APIC 1
ioapic0: Assigning ISA IRQ 12 to local APIC 2
ioapic0: Assigning ISA IRQ 14 to local APIC 0
ioapic0: Assigning ISA PCI 16 to local APIC 1
ioapic0: Assigning ISA PCI 17 to local APIC 2
ioapic0: Assigning ISA PCI 18 to local APIC 0
ioapic0: Assigning ISA PCI 19 to local APIC 1
ioapic0: Assigning ISA PCI 22 to local APIC 2
trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad4s1a
start_init: trying /sbin/init
[hung at this point]

3) Many others have seen the hanging/lock-up after "mount root". I
believe one found a workaround by setting ATA_STATIC_ID in their kernel
configuration. I realise this is a problem when you can't get the
system up to a point of building a kernel; chicken-and-egg problem,

Well, I can build a kernel if I run the 7.0-release kernel. That's how I
got to 7-stable on the machine in the first place. I used "sneaker net"
to copy it to this one via a CD (as I mentioned, the 7.0 kernel boots
but the Realtek ethernet device is not recognized).

So the problem is that 7.0-RELEASE works fine for you, but after
upgrading your RELENG_7 source (to what is now 7.1-BETA), the machine
hangs after printing the mount root message. Is this correct?

Yes, that is pretty much it. The Realtek ethernet isn't working in in
7.0-RELEASE either, but I'm guessing that that is a different (and less
serious) problem related to changes in that device.

Here's another question: does booting into single-user exhibit the same
problem as multi-user?

It looks like when I try a single-user mode (and verbose) boot the only
difference is that the las line shown above (the start_init line) isn't
printed. Otherwise, the hang is the same.

4) The Realtek NIC on that motherboard is probably too new to be
supported under RELENG_7. Realtek has a history of releasing different
sub-revisions of the same NIC/PHY, and the internal changes are severe
enough to cause the NIC to not work correctly (under any OS) without
full driver support for that specific sub-revision.

That's what I suspected. The values displayed when doing a "pciconf -lv"
are similar as for this system I'm using to type this, but now that
I look closer and make a direct comparison, the failing device has a
rev=0x02 vs. rev=0x01 for the working one. The pciconf -lv output for
the failing mb is:

none3@pci0:2:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0xe0001458 chip=0x816810ec rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Realtek Semiconductor'
device = 'RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC'
class = network
subclass = ethernet

Regarding the Realtek issue: I've CC'd PYUN Yong-Hyeon (surname in
caps), who maintains the re(4) driver for FreeBSD. He might have a
patch available for you to try, or help determine how to get this NIC
working on FreeBSD. He'll probably need more than just pciconf -lv
output, but should be able to work with you.

Ok, that'd be great. I must say that I'm close to simply returning this
MB and going with something not quite so new that is more likely to
work. I was hoping to get this system up and running this weekend. :(

I wish I knew what was causing the lock-up for you. I'm truly baffled,
especially given that the system is able to boot + find the kernel +
load kernel modules. Debugging this problem is out of field; jhb@ might
have some ideas, as I'm not sure what magic happens immediately before
the root filesystem is mounted.

Those debugging/helping may want "disklabel -r -A ad4s1" output. At
least you can boot 7.0-RELEASE to get that information.

Regarding hardware:

I myself purchased an Asus P5Q SE board, with an Intel Q9550 CPU earlier
this week. The board was affordable (barely US$100). One of the
reasons I went with this board is because it lacks a) Realtek NICs, b)
Broadcom NICs, c) JMicron SATA controllers, and d) Silicon Image SATA
controllers. All of those are devices I stay away from.

The Atheros/Attansic L1E NIC is known to have issues under Vista (not
sure if the issues are with Vista or the actual driver itself), but I
use XP). FreeBSD supports this NIC under the age(4) driver, also
maintained by Yong-Hyeon. Of course I haven't tested it yet.

I'll be building the above system today, and will post the results of
booting/installing FreeBSD on it as a test case.

Well, I swapped motherboards to a slightly older but similar board with
pretty much identical results. This one's a Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2. I
was trying to stick with a MB that has onboard graphics (this is in a
2u rack case and I don't have a riser card for it so there's no way to
install a video card currently).

With this board it doesn't get quite as far even. It prints out all the
APIC messages as above then a GEOM message:

GEOM: new disk ad4

And then hangs. Also, the ethernet NIC on this board is the same as the
previous one so it's not found either.

Bob


--
| Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |

--
Bob Willcox All the evidence concerning the universe
bob@xxxxxxxxxx has not yet been collected, so there's still hope.
Austin, TX
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