Hi folks, I've been contracted to try and get FreeBSD up and running on a Sun Fire X4500 "thumper" type system. It's been claimed as far back as 2007 that this system is apparently supported with no major issues: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2007-May/003165.html However in trying both FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, 8.1-STABLE (9/2010), and 7.3-STABLE (9/2010), I am getting the exact same failure mode as this fellow: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=14887 The system boots up, I don't see anything pertaining to disks at all in the boot messages, and, unsurprisingly the installer claims that no disks are found. I've tried this just booting normally, hitting "6" at the boot menu and manually loading the mvs driver: load mvs boot Nothing works. I've tried disabling ACPI but that just causes FreeBSD to hang at boot. Tried falling back to 7.x-STABLE in the hopes that it would contain the pre-mvs SATA driver and that might work better but seems no results there. Tried re-scanning devices in the installer but it fails just as the poster on the forums reports - takes a second and nothing new ever comes up. Though I haven't actually verified this booting with something else e.g. Linux and looking at the PCI information, my understanding is that this system is based on the Marvell MV88SX6081 SATA controller which seems to be supported from looking at the source code of the mvs driver. The PCI ID string for this controller, 0x608111ab, is right there in the source. This isn't even a particularly new piece of hardware. Is there anyone out there who has a Sun Fire X4500 up and running OK with FreeBSD? If so - what's the secret? Is there something in the BIOS that I need to flip? Maybe there are different revs of this hardware each with a different SATA controller chip? I'm really interested in working in concert with someone in the know to do whatever it takes to hopefully get this resolved; if anyone can lend a hand please drop me a line. Thanks, -Sean
On 12.10.10 20:38, Sean Caron wrote:> Hi folks, >Hi,> I've been contracted to try and get FreeBSD up and running on a Sun Fire > X4500 "thumper" type system. It's been claimed as far back as 2007 that > this system is apparently supported with no major issues: > > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2007-May/003165.html > > However in trying both FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, 8.1-STABLE (9/2010), and > 7.3-STABLE (9/2010), I am getting the exact same failure mode as this > fellow: > > http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=14887 > > The system boots up, I don't see anything pertaining to disks at all in > the boot messages, and, unsurprisingly the installer claims that no > disks are found. > > I've tried this just booting normally, hitting "6" at the boot menu and > manually loading the mvs driver: > > load mvs > boot >On 8.1 try set hw.hptrr.attach_generic=0 load mvs boot After I set hw.hptrr.attach_generic to 0 mvs found all my disk. Without it I had the same problem you describe. HTH, Florian
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:38:42PM -0400, Sean Caron wrote:> Hi folks, > > I've been contracted to try and get FreeBSD up and running on a Sun > Fire X4500 "thumper" type system. It's been claimed as far back as > 2007 that this system is apparently supported with no major issues: > > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2007-May/003165.html > > However in trying both FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, 8.1-STABLE (9/2010), and > 7.3-STABLE (9/2010), I am getting the exact same failure mode as > this fellow: > > http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=14887 > > The system boots up, I don't see anything pertaining to disks at all > in the boot messages, and, unsurprisingly the installer claims that > no disks are found. > > I've tried this just booting normally, hitting "6" at the boot menu > and manually loading the mvs driver: > > load mvs > boot > > Nothing works. I've tried disabling ACPI but that just causes > FreeBSD to hang at boot. > > ... > > Though I haven't actually verified this booting with something else > e.g. Linux and looking at the PCI information, my understanding is > that this system is based on the Marvell MV88SX6081 SATA controller > which seems to be supported from looking at the source code of the > mvs driver. The PCI ID string for this controller, 0x608111ab, is > right there in the source. This isn't even a particularly new piece > of hardware. > > Is there anyone out there who has a Sun Fire X4500 up and running OK > with FreeBSD? If so - what's the secret? Is there something in the > BIOS that I need to flip? Maybe there are different revs of this > hardware each with a different SATA controller chip? > > I'm really interested in working in concert with someone in the know > to do whatever it takes to hopefully get this resolved; if anyone > can lend a hand please drop me a line.My recommendation: Boot a FreeBSD LiveFS CD[1] in verbose mode (it's one of the boot menu items). Once you have a shell, mount a USB flash drive, floppy drive, or anything that you can write to and save output from the following two commands into separate files then provide them here (links preferred; sometimes the mailing list eats MIME attachments): $ dmesg -a $ pciconf -lvc This should help in determining what might be going on. I'm advocating verbose boot because if there's an mvs(4) controller detected but it's not attaching/initialising correctly, verbose mode might indicate what's going on. Hard to say. If you find that there's no mvs(4) driver being attached, you can try hitting "6" to drop to the loader prompt, enter "load mvs" like you have been, then "boot -v" to boot verbose. You might want to save output from doing that too into separate files as well. I'm also CC'ing mav@ who works on the mvs(4) driver. [1]: Snag an appropriate 8.1-STABLE-201009 snapshot if you could, from whatever mirror suits you best, e.g.: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/201009/ -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc@parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
Hi Florian, I gave that a try and it worked perfectly; the system comes right up and sees all my Marvell controllers and disks. I remember reading about the Highpoint driver issue of grabbing onto some non-Highpoint Marvell based controllers but for some reason thought it was fixed in the STABLE images that I was using (guess not!). Now off to play with ZFS... Thanks so much! -Sean On Tue, 12 Oct 2010, Florian Smeets wrote:> > On 8.1 try > > set hw.hptrr.attach_generic=0 > load mvs > boot > > After I set hw.hptrr.attach_generic to 0 mvs found all my disk. Without > it I had the same problem you describe. > > HTH, > Florian >