*BSD News Article 99818


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!infeed1.internetmci.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!143.183.152.24!scnews.sc.intel.com!itnews.sc.intel.com!news.fm.intel.com!news.or.intel.com!chnews!jreynold
From: jreynold@sedona.intel.com (John Reynolds)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Is support of Adaptec 152x truely flakey?
Date: 16 Jul 1997 16:31:04 GMT
Organization: Intel Corporation, Chandler, AZ
Lines: 51
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <slrn5sptq8.dpb.jreynold@hip186.ch.intel.com>
Reply-To: jreynold@sedona.intel.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: hip186.ch.intel.com
X-Newsreader: slrn (0.9.4.1 UNIX)
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:44553

Hello,

I've been running with an Adaptec 1522a card hooked to my scsi cdrom for
about a year now, and just recently purchased a nice big scsi drive. As I
went through the install procedure for 2.2.1, everything went fine, the
kernel found the new scsi disk, partition and disklabel went off without
a hitch. Newfs went off without a hitch, but when it started installing
all the source and binaries, etc. I kept getting panic after panic after
panic. On try #3, I just went to sleep :( ...

One of the panics said:

  panic: panicing for historical reasons

(if anyone knows what the hell that particular message means).

Two days ago, I think it was J"org who said, in the hackers-digest, that the
driver for the 152x cards was a "festing hunk of ----" (paraphrasing :), and
that it was unusable at best. Someone also said that the 152x support is
going away off the official "supported" list soon because of this.

I thought this was strange because I'd used the scsi cdrom for a year+,
but, I can't think of anything else that would cause these panics during
install except for a flakey scsi driver (I've been running FreeBSD for almost
two years now on the same hardware, and my new scsi drive is the only piece
of "new" hardware in the system). I'm sure the card was under much more "load"
reading from and writing to scsi devices ... which could bring about this
alledged unstability ...

Can anyone please elaborate on the real "quality" of the 152x support? If it
ain't gonna happen, then I am perfectly willing to get a new card. I searched
the web this morning and found a reasonably priced BusLogic 545C card.
The fbsd web site says this card is "supported" too, but seeing that it
says the 152x is "supported" my obvious question is "really? How well is
it supported?" Does anyone have any recommendations for a reasonably priced
ISA scsi-2 controller, or does anyone have any experience with the 545C
card? What about experiences with the Adaptec AH-2742/2842 series cards--those
are allegedly on the "supported" list as well....

Thanks alot!

-Jr

ps: please reply via e-mail if possible. Thanks!

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
| John Reynolds                 Performance & Logic Verification Group      |
| Intel Corporation         MS: CH6-210   Phone: 554-9092   pgr: 868-6512   |
| jreynold@sedona.intel.com     http://www-adcs.ch.intel.com/~jreynold/     |
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=