Re: 5.2-RELEASE TODO

Tom wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
>>> Well, there are so many kinds of PERC cards.  Some are just Mylex cards.
>>>Others are MegaRAID.  I think they use some Adaptec now.
>>>
>>
>>My troubles were with the MegaRAID variant, I'm not sure about the others..
>>
>>
>>> Either way, I tried booting the install CD with all cards disconnected,
>>>just to see if I could get the installer up to the main menu.  No go.  The
>>>display switches off as soon as sysinstall starts probing devices.  It
>>>appears to panic, but the display is dead.  Once I was able to use
>>>scrolllock at the critical moment just before the kernel starts
>>>sysinstall, and prevent the display from switch off, but when I release
>>>the scroll lock, I was at the DDB prompt.  Not good.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>First - I hope you mean the cards are physically OUT of the machine - it
>>seemed to me that if they had a logical disk configuration on the card,
>>it would hang.  Although, it sounds like your problem is different.
>>Actually, it kind of sounds like it thinks you are doing the "-p" boot
>>thing to check for keyboard and roll over to the serial port.  Other
>>than that, I'm out of ideas (doesn't take long for that to happen
>>though!).. :(
> 
> 
>   Yes, the cards are physically out of the machine.
> 
>   "-p" seems unlikely, since the display is literally shutoff.  The
> monitor goes into a power-save mode, so it appears that as soon as
> sysinstall touches whatever devices it touches, the onboard video stops
> generating output.  I've also tried a serial console, which seems to fail
> the same way.  There is simply no output to the serial console after
> sysinstall starts, and the machine appears to be hung.
> 
>   So, this was with 5.0 and 5.1.  I will have to try 5.2 and see if it has
> the same problem.  No one has contacted me about my PR, or even given me
> any suggestions about more debugging info that I can gather, so unless
> this gets fixed by chance, I suspect that 5.x is just going to orphan a
> significant number of machines.  Which is a shame, since 5.x would be
> clearly superior on a quad Xeon machine than 4.9-RELEASE.
> 
> 
>>Eric
> 
> 
> 
> Tom
> 

Providing a serial console capture when booting with the -hv flags might
be interesting.

Scott