beta 3 (Fisher) as soon as I startx I get the following in /var/log/messages and printed out to the root console: Feb 2 15:33:34 rockne kernel: (scsi1:A:3): async, 16bit Feb 2 15:33:34 rockne kernel: (scsi1:A:3): synchronous at 20.0MHz, offset 0xf, 16bit Feb 2 15:33:34 rockne kernel: (scsi1:A:3): async, 16bit Feb 2 15:33:34 rockne kernel: (scsi1:A:3): synchronous at 20.0MHz, offset 0xf, 16bit Feb 2 15:33:34 rockne kernel: (scsi1:A:3): async, 16bit Feb 2 15:33:34 rockne kernel: (scsi1:A:3): synchronous at 20.0MHz, offset 0xf, 16bit There are also strange sounds coming from the computer when these messages are printed. This is the part that concerns me and the main reason I marked priority/severity as high. More info: # cat /proc/scsi/scsi Attached devices: Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00 Vendor: SEAGATE Model: ST318404LW Rev: 0006 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03 Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 03 Lun: 00 Vendor: PLEXTOR Model: CD-ROM PX-40TW Rev: 1.04 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02 The SCSI controller is an on-board Adaptec 7899 dual-channel Ultra/160 controller The CD-ROM drive was empty. If the drive has a CD in it there are no problems. If I exit X the problem goes away. This is with the default GNOME desktop. I noticed that if I change the CD properties under the Control Panel so that it doesn't try to automount or autoplay CDs then the problem appears to go away as well.
Doug, this looks like Justin's beta driver -- see if this information is still useful to him.
This would be a description of what happens when magicdev (part of the gnome desktop) is querying the CD-ROM drive every so often to see if there is a CD in the drive. Obviously, it's causing a lot of renegotiations in the driver (my driver was having the same problem so I modified it to only renegotiate if the returned SENSE info included something about a parity error or similar). The part about making noise is likely something to do with the CD-ROM drive itself and probably doesn't matter which driver you are using (unless there are a lot of bus device resets being delivered). I'll forward to Justin Gibbs at Adaptec.
Version 6.1.1 of the aic7xxx driver will now only report negotiation messages if the result of the negotiation differs from that last reported (unless you have verbose messages turned on in the driver). This will remove the messages but, as Doug mentioned, the sound your CD drive makes when the system queries it for media is something you'll have to take up with the hardware vendor. Doug's change to his driver to only do the negotiation if sense data indicates a pariticular type of error sounds dangerous. The sense retrieval may hang the bus if, for instance, the target has been power cycled or reset by another initiator prior to reporting the check condition. If that is the case, our prior negotiation status has been invalidated and attempting to transfer at the certainly require recovery. If the recovery results in a bus reset, then some operations on "innocent targets" (tape writes, a cd burning session) will be uncorrectably terminated.