Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 58026
aic7899 - aic7xxx hang on install
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:38:53 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2.1) Gecko/20010901 Description of problem: Installer hang with aic7xxx with aic7899 SCSI controllers, tried noapic, no_probe etc. problem "seems" different to existing aic7xxx installer hangs (but i might be wrong) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot for fresh install, with CD1 2.type, linux, linux apic or linux aic=no_probe 3.Hang on loading aic7xxx ....... Actual Results: VC4 - showed loading scsi-mod module SCSI subsystem driver revision: 1.00 loading sd_mod module loading aic7xxx module (scsi0) <Adaptec AIC-7899 Ultra 160/m SCSI host adapter> found at PCI 3/4/0 (scsi0) Wide channel A, SCSI ID=7, 32/255 SCBs (scsi0) Downloading sequencer code... 396 instructions downloaded (scsi1) <Adaptec AIC-7899 Ultra 160/m SCSI host adapter> found at PCI 3/4/1 (scsi1) Wide channel B, SCSI ID=7, 32/255 SCBs (scsi1) Downloading sequencer code... 396 instructions downloaded (scsi1:-1:-1:-1) spurious interrupt during configuration cleared scsi0: Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-fast SCSI 5.2.4/5.2.0 <Adaptec AIC-7899 Ultra 160/m SCSI host adapter scsi1: Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-fast SCSI 5.2.4/5.2.0 <Adaptec AIC-7899 Ultra 160/m SCSI host adapter Expected Results: Installer continued Additional info: The machine configuration (according to reporter) is Motherboard: Supermicro P4DC6+ dual Xeon processor - Supermicro BIOS v.1.1 Award Medallion BIOS v.6.00PG On-board Adaptec AIC-7899W SCSI controller - BIOS v.3.10S1 1 hard drive - Quantum Atlas 10KII-TY184J 18.4GB Ultra 160/LVD/SE Will be doing some direct work with the box (1 of 20 for a web cluster) in the next few days and may have more information
We have same issue on our Pen4 machine. We guess the reason of this is just SCSI BIOS version. On 3.0 or later, the older aic7xxx.o couldn't work correctly. The situation is very similar, and it could be solved. When installation, we must set the installer as "noprobe" mode, and use scsi driver aic7xxx_mod.o instead of aic7xxx.o, however this might not be complete installation because of some bug of aic7xxx_mod.o in redhat original kernel. We've changed it into new aic7xxx_mod.o(Ver 6.2.4) from http://people.FreeBSD.org/~gibbs/linux/ This new one cleared our heat run and load test. So we strongly recommend redhat to change aic7xxx_mod.o driver into this new driver. Once redhat said aic7xxx_mod.o is not very stable, but now we think it seems to be good enough.
If you make an image with the drvblock.img on it and boot with 'linux noprobe' and use F2 to use the other aic7xxx driver from the driver disk (should have a description which includes aic7xxx_mod), does it work?
It works *incompletely*. The original drvblock.img in redhat 7.2 CD has aic7xxx_mod.o(Ver 6.1.13) which is not latest(has some issues on our heat run test). We've not tried to make new drvblock.img which has aic7xxx_mod(6.2.4). We made and tested kickstart file to overwrite aic7xxx_mod.o into 6.2.4. It has been working currectly. drvblock.img doesn't seem to be for installed kernel, it maybe for kernel only during installation. If we could rewrite aic7xxx_mod.o for every of kernel-2.4.7-10BOOT, kernel-2.4.7-10 and kernel-smp-2.4.7-10, it must work perfectly.
Same here - total hang with RedHat 7.2 Motherboard: Supermicro P4DC6+ dual Xeon 1.7 ghz processor Supermicro BIOS v.1.1 Award Medallion BIOS v.6.00PG On-board Adaptec AIC-7899W SCSI controller - BIOS v.3.10S1
We confirmed that we can install RH7.1 and RH7.2 into these BAD hardwares. 1. boot installer with paramater "noprobe". 2. make installer load "aic7xxx_mod.o" manually. 3. do normal installation. 4. at the last screen of installer, you must do something. 4.1) press Alt+Ctrl+F2 (and go into command line). 4.2) chroot /mnt/sysimage. 4.3) vi /etc/modules.conf (and remove any aic7xxx line, below). 4.4) make initrd again (for RH7.2 UP, do "mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-2.4.7-10.img 2.4.7-10"). 4.5) do lilo again. 5. Alt+Ctrl+F7 and finish installation. The RedHat Installer adds scsi host adapter lines into modules.conf like below: alias scsi_hostadapter aic7xxx_mod # This is added because of manual select. alias scsi_hostadapter1 aic7xxx # This is added by installer automatically. alias scsi_hostadapter2 aic7xxx # This is also added by him. and making initrd and doing lilo are done accoding to this modules.conf. This is why the redhat linux fail to boot on first boot time however the installation was succeeded when we specify to use aic7xxx_mod, two drivers(aic7xxx_mod and aic7xxx) is loaded on its boot time and have some conflict. So, we must remove these line, make initrd and do lilo again DURING INSTALLATION. We guess this is installer bug. for the machine which has two IntelEtherExpress100, if we do noprobe install and set e100 driver for them, installer adds a line below: alias eth1 eepro100 into /etc/modules.conf. However, we know this is not so easy to fix, because many drivers have a possibility to have conflicts each other...
Fixed in CVS and update disk at http://people.redhat.com/katzj/7.2updates.img
alright I'm an idiot - the 7.2updates.img link isn't working ... any others?
Sorry, I can't type.. http://people.redhat.com/katzj/7.2-updates.img (and it's fixed in that it fixes the handling of initrd creation when you use a driver disk; you'll still need to use the driver disk)
On an dual cpu Asus P2B board with aic7xxx I had similar problems. Though for me the install worked fine without errors, but no initrd is made or installed and the resulting machine can't boot bcause it has no aic7xxx support. When booting with a custom kernel, I found that other essential things were also missing from the install. Most importantly, rpm didn't get installed, renderig the machine quite useless.