freebsd stable - Apr 2006 - Tyan K8WE BIOS v1.03 and -STABLE

I tried updating the BIOS on my K8WE (S2895) yesterday to 1.03, but after
the update, FreeBSD (RELENG_6 dated March 26) would randomly freeze after
booting.

As I was updating from v1.01, I suspect it may be the updates to the nVidia
SATA firmware that caused the issue, as things generally froze shortly after
the background fsck processed kicked in (with, obviously, the exception of
the first boot, and a few others).  It may be worth noting that Windows,
though booting fine, did complain that the ATA driver was mis-matched for
the firmware of the ATA controller.

Is anyone else successfully running -STABLE with v1.03 on a K8WE?  Just
wondering if this is something specific to the options I've chosen, or if
it's an interaction issue between FreeBSD and this BIOS revision.

(No, I haven't tried just going to 1.02, as I needed the machine.  Though
that should be a fairly good test to narrow down what the problem is.)

  - Damian

* Damian Gerow (dgerow@afflictions.org) wrote:
> I tried updating the BIOS on my K8WE (S2895) yesterday to 1.03, but
> after the update, FreeBSD (RELENG_6 dated March 26) would randomly
> freeze after booting.
>
> As I was updating from v1.01, I suspect it may be the updates to
> the nVidia SATA firmware that caused the issue, as things generally
> froze shortly after the background fsck processed kicked in (with,
> obviously, the exception of the first boot, and a few others).  It may
> be worth noting that Windows, though booting fine, did complain that
> the ATA driver was mis-matched for the firmware of the ATA controller.
>
> Is anyone else successfully running -STABLE with v1.03 on a K8WE?  Just
> wondering if this is something specific to the options I've chosen, or
if
> it's an interaction issue between FreeBSD and this BIOS revision.
> 
> (No, I haven't tried just going to 1.02, as I needed the machine. 
Though
> that should be a fairly good test to narrow down what the problem is.)
I've not tried 1.03; I just tried flashing, but apparantly the only
floppy I have to hand has died.  However, I've been running 1.02 for
months without problems.  The only SATA issues I've encountered are
non-functional hot-plug and the usual 4GB+/multiple drives lockup, which I
"solved" by using a LSI MegaRAID for 6 of the 8 drives.

This is using the same SATA firmware as 1.03 according to the changelog
on http://www.tyan.com/support/html/b_s2895.html so I doubt it's that.

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
    http://hur.st/