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Old 8th March 2011
shep shep is offline
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Default Documentation vs pciide/atapiscsi controller

I was wondering where to report a problem. I previously posted about a Via C7 motherboard with a VT8237S southbridge not recognizing an SATA DVDrw on channel 2. Apparently the the chip supports one ide channel and two sata channels but the OpenBSD driver only supports one ide channel and 1 sata channel. The pciide and atapiscsi man pages do not say anything about this and those who rely on the man pages are going to disappointed. SATA burners are no more expensive than ide burner (although no faster) and make for a neater installation.

http://old.nabble.com/kernel-6117:-S...p22815411.html

I suspect the developers who wrote the drivers had a good reason to not support the 2nd SATA channel. In the mini-ITX arena the major vendor is Intel which on my Atom 330 mobo works like a charm. Unless one plans to use a Via board with old ide hardware, they are really not well supported by OpenBSD and I believe the documentation should say so. Is "www@openbsd.org" the right place to report an issue with the documentation.

Last edited by shep; 8th March 2011 at 01:49 AM. Reason: grammer
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Old 8th March 2011
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by shep View Post
I was wondering where to report a problem.
Yes, I know some simply post their woes on misc@, & wait for the developers to respond.

But given that the official release date for OpenBSD 4.9 is slightly less than two months now, creating the 4.9-release branch in CVS is likely to occur within the next week or so (Time has to be allowed to get the official CD sets reproduced & sent to the vendors...). Thus, getting this matter addressed is not likely to occur before tagging. Since your goal is to have someone look into this, I would suggest formally submitting a bug report via:

http://www.openbsd.org/report.html

...just to ensure there is an audit trail & this doesn't get lost in the cracks.

Although I don't recall ever seeing an issue get dropped, it is best to use the established system.
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Old 8th March 2011
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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OpenBSD has a single PCI IDE driver for multiple vendors/chipsets, this includes SATA controllers in PCI IDE mode (..instead of AHCI).

The driver is full of quirks for initilizating all sorts devices, setting up channels, etc.. and there are buggy/undocumented chipsets out there that don't work properly as-is.

If you want to get this resolved, send a bug report using sendbug(1) or send an email to bugs@ or even tech@.

This is not an issue with documentation, it is an issue with your chipset.
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Old 8th March 2011
shep shep is offline
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From http://www.openbsd.org/report.html
Quote:
Types of bug reports in order of desirability:

1. Repeatable problems with source fixes are the best.
2. Repeatable problems that are not specific to your hardware/software layout.
3. Repeatable problems specific to your software layout.
4. Repeatable problems specific to your hardware layout.
5. Non-repeatable problems -- or problems you do not wish to repeat.
I think this falls somewhere between 2 and 4 in priorities and it look like it had already been submitted 2 years ago. I'll go ahead and resubmit it as a bug and if they can fix it would be great but if it is blown off as buggy hardware I feel it should be mentioned in the documentation.

Last edited by shep; 8th March 2011 at 03:16 AM. Reason: spelling
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Old 20th March 2011
shep shep is offline
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I'm continuing to look at this issue sporadically and will restate the problem. It appears that that a number of Via southbridge chipsets (VT8237, VT8237A, VT8237S) only support one SATA drive in OpenBSD - they are supported in NetBSD, FreeBSD and Linux. The error reports indicate the problem mostly on the bsd.rd kernel with two sata hard drives and in my case and sata hd along with an sata dvdrw drive. I have tried booting the straight /bsd kernel and in my case the boot hangs very early with the line
Quote:
apati_scsi_intr: warning reading only 0 of 18 bytes
It is a very difficult bug to report as the hang occurs early enough that sendbug, or mounting a usb thumb drive are not possible. One of the reports I found did have the dmesg from a serial cable to another machine but the bug report was just ignored with no responses. (Actually none of the reports on this issue had a response and the one good report that went to the trouble to get a dmesg was also ignored from any developer)

It appears that the bug occurred between 4.4 -> 4.5. One odd thing I noticed was that the GnoBSD i386 CD in livemode does not hang and does recognize the drive while jiggami's fluxbox CD hangs. The FAQ says the softraid mode of the chipsets is not supported but none of the bug reports were using raid, they just wanted a second sata drive.

The ethos is to trust the man pages and the FAQ prior to anything else but both of these essentially state the chipset is supported except in RAID mode. My bug report appears to languishing along with the others.
http://old.nabble.com/Second-SATA-ch...d31094000.html

Not sure how much more effort to put into this - people buying these mobo's thinking they will get a supported chip are going to be unhappy.
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Old 20th March 2011
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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There is nothing that we can do about it, make some noise on the lists or contact a developer who has touched that area of the tree recently.

If you don't provide them with logs, they won't fix it.
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