Re: [regression] unable to boot: no GEOM devices found.

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 2:08 PM, Alexander Motin <mav_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> YongHyeon PYUN wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 11:12:55PM +0300, Alexander Motin wrote:
>>> David Naylor wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday 12 April 2011 08:17:51 Alexander Motin wrote:
>>>>> David Naylor wrote:
>>>>>> I am running -current and since a few days ago (at least 2011/04/11) I am
>>>>>> unable to boot.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The boot process stops when it looks to find a bootable device.  The
>>>>>> prompt (when pressing '?') does not display any device and yielding one
>>>>>> second (or more) to the kernel (by pressing '.') does not improve the
>>>>>> situation.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A known working date is 2011/02/20.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I am running amd64 on a nVidia MCP51 chipset.
>>>>> MCP51... again...
>>>>>
>>>>>> I am willing to help any way I can.
>>>>> You could start from capturing and showing verbose dmesg. Full or at
>>>>> least in parts related to disks.
>>>> I captured the dmesg output for both the old (working) kernel and the new
>>>> (bad) kernel.  See attached for the difference between the two.  If you need
>>>> the full dmesg please let me know.
>>>>
>>>> One thing I found is that the old kernel would not boot if I simply rebooted
>>>> from the bad kernel.  I had to do a hard power off before the old kernel would
>>>> work again.  Is some device state surviving between reboots?
>>> +ata2: reiniting channel ..
>>> +ata2: SATA connect time=0ms status=00000113
>>> +ata2: reset tp1 mask=01 ostat0=58 ostat1=00
>>> +ata2: stat0=0x50 err=0x01 lsb=0x00 msb=0x00
>>> +ata2: reset tp2 stat0=50 stat1=00 devices=0x1
>>> +ata2: reinit done ..
>>> +unknown: FAILURE - ATA_IDENTIFY timed out LBA=0
>>>
>>> As soon as all devices detected but not responding to commands, I would
>>> suppose that there is something wrong with ATA interrupts. There is a
>>> long chain of interrupt problems in this chipset. I have already tried
>>> to debug one case where ATA wasn't generating interrupts at all.
>>> Unfortunately, without success -- requests were executing, but not
>>> generating interrupts, it wasn't looked like ATA driver problem.
>>>
>>> What's about possible candidate to revision triggering your problem, I
>>> would look on this message:
>>> +pcib0: Enabling MSI window for HyperTransport slave at pci0:0:9:0
>>>
>>> At least it is recent (SVN revs 219737,219740 on 2011-03-18 by jhb) and
>>> it is interrupt related.
>>
>> Does the driver disable MSI for MCP51?
>
> ata(4) doesn't uses MSI by default and I doubt this controller supports
> them any way. But if I am not mixing something, there were very strange
> situations with MSI on that chipset, when enabling them one one device
> caused interrupt problems on another.
>
>> I think jhb's patch fixed one MSI issue of all MCP chipset.
>
> I am not telling it is wrong. It could just trigger something.

Could the OP try disabling MSI[X] to see whether or not the issue
still occurs then?
-Garrett