Hi!

Only one week ago did I manage to find another 450MHz PII for my dual PII capable mobo, and so I decided to compile a new kernel with SMP capabilities. The problem is I cannot get my linux to boot with the new kernel (have tested many releases from 2.6.3-rc2 to 2.6.5-rc3-mm1) because the SCSI controller is not set up properly (and the linux root partition is located on the SCSI HD).

The controller is a dual channel Symbios 53C896 based solution built into the motherboard (AMI MegaRUM II).

There seems to be a problem with IRQ configuration because I get the following during startup (I had to write it down on paper, no log on /var/log/messages for some reason):

sym0: <896> rev 0x1 at PCI 0000:02:0c.0 irq 26
sym0: Symbios NVRAM, ID 7, Fast 40, SE, Parity Checking
sym0: request irq 26 failure
sym0: giving up
sym0: <896> rev 0x1 at PCI 0000:02:0c.1 irq 21
sym0: Symbios NVRAM, ID 7, Fast 40, LVD, Parity Checking
sym0: request irq 21 failure
sym0: giving up

Slackware's Stock scsi kernel works fine (copied from /var/log/messages):

root@jim:/# cat /var/log/messages | grep sym
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym.2.12.1: setting PCI_COMMAND_PARITY...
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym.2.12.0: setting PCI_COMMAND_PARITY...
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym0: <896> rev 0x1 on pci bus 2 device 12 function
1 irq 5
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym0: using 64 bit DMA addressing
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym0: SCSI BUS has been reset.
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym1: <896> rev 0x1 on pci bus 2 device 12 function
0 irq 10
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym1: using 64 bit DMA addressing
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym1: SCSI BUS has been reset.
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: scsi0 : sym-2.1.17a
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: scsi1 : sym-2.1.17a
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym1:1:0: tagged command queuing enabled, command qu
eue depth 16.
Mar 31 03:10:19 jim kernel: sym1:1: FAST-20 WIDE SCSI 40.0 MB/s ST (50.0 ns, off
set 15)

(isn't it supposed to be capable of 80MB/sec? anyway...)

I have even tried to disable the second controller from the BIOS (no devices attached to it), manually set the IRQs for the SCSI controllers through the BIOS, and pass the "append = "sym53c8xx=irqm:1"" option to lilo (which is supposed to force the use of BIOS IRQ information, or so I have understood by reading the sym53c8xx.txt file that comes with the kernel source) but the problem won't go away...

Any ideas?
Thanks for your time
George

I recompiled the 2.4 Slackware kernel and everything works fine. I'll try the new 2.6.5 kernel and see if anything comes out... If I ever get to download it for kernel.org does not respond to http requests...