Another 5.2-RC2 experience

I gave 5.2-RC2 a spin and found the following problems:

1) Intel ICH5 SATA still doesn't work in native mode.  When I boot the
   installation floppy diskettes each of my two SATA drisk drives draws
   something in the range of 25-30 error messages of the general form:

        ad4: WARNING - READ DMA recovered from missing interrupt

   with a roughly 10 second pause before each message.  Someone suggested
   that this was caused by a glitch in ACPI support, but this does not
   seem to be the case.  I disabled the SATA controller and installed
   5.2-RC2 on an old SCSI disk drive.  When I boot the installed 5.2-RC2
   with the SATA controller reenabled, the missing-interrupt problem does
   not always occur and is not suppressed by selecting the disabled-ACPI
   boot option in the beastie bootstrap menu.  In fact, the SATA controller
   may seem to work just fine with the normal boot and then fail when I
   try the disabled-ACPI boot.  The ICH5 SATA controller seems to work
   adequately well in both FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.1.

2) The gigabit ethernet controller on the i875P CSA bus (em driver),
   consistently fails (apparently continuously timing out and resetting)
   unless I boot with ACPI disabled (in which case it seems to work just
   fine).  This device also seems to work correctly in both FreeBSD 4.9
   and 5.1.

3) The UFS1 file system super block summary data incompatibility (with
   FreeBSD 4.9) is still a problem.

I get the impression (from reading the traffic in the freebsd-current
mailing list) that these problems are well known but considered to be
rather unimportant.  If this is the case, the release engineering team
might as well get ahead of the game and describe these glitches in the
5.2-release errata now. :-)

For me, problem (1) is fatal all by itself.  Problem (2) would probably
make using 5.2-RC2 unattractive even if there were no problem (1).
Problems (1) and (3) make even testing 5.2-RC2 very inconvenient.
(I probably won't try booting it again.)  Before I completely gave up
on 5.2-RC2 I went ahead and built the several dozen ports I normally
use and stumbled over these glitches:

   - linux-devtools and linux-devtools-7 won't extract because the rpms
     XFree86-devel-4.whatever.i386.rpm are not available from any of
     the listed ftp sites

   - grub won't build (I forget why; some sort of compilation error)

Dan Strick
strick_at_covad.net