Re: ATA + DMA still giving repeatable freezes

At 2004-01-06T19:46:31Z, Robert Watson <rwatson_at_freebsd.org> writes:

> Not sure if you misread, but it looks like you're disabling ACPI rather
> than apic (confusing, eh? :-).

Heh!  Well, I'd seen suggestions for disabling both.  At any rate, my old
kernel (with "device apic" commented but DMA enabled) was failing during load, and my new
one (with "device apic" enabled and DMA disabled) has been chugging along
for two weeks with only the occasional:

    ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_MUL retrying (2 retries left)
    ata0: resetting devices ..
    done

> I'm currently in a situation on my Dell Notebook where leaving the new
> ACPI enable but "device apic" disabled seems to get me to full
> functionality.  I discovered a BIOS upgrade on the Dell web site, and need
> to try installing that to see if it helps.  I also haven't tried plugging
> and playing DRI as yet.

Thanks for the pointer, but I'm using the most recent BIOS.  I've checked
all of my BIOS settings (which are few on my motherboard) but there's
nothing for me to "back off".

Sigh.  I've just about reached the point of declaring this motherboard/drive
combo to be incompatible with FreeBSD 5.x, which is a pity since it's
otherwise been a great server for several years.  :-/
-- 
Kirk Strauser