I have 2 adaptec 2940 cards one with the bios of v1.21 1995 and the other
one is v1.23 1996 version. Using a pre 2.0 Linux kernel (1.3.x) if I do a
'find / -print' while using the old controller all is OK, if I use the new
AHA2940, I can see that there is a timeout problem, I have an LED lignt for
the controller and I can see the controller stops accessing the drive while
drive is on solid access (the drives light is on solid), then I get an error
message telling me that a 'SCSI: aborting command due to timeout : pid 8941
, scsi0 channel 0, Id2, Lun0. Read(6) 0b 04 28 02 00' and my System hangs
for good. If I reboot (reset), then FSCK hangs since it has to do alot of
disk access to repair the filesystem and it gets to the same exact situation.
Now I have upgraded to Liunx 2.0 and the problem is somewhat fixed. I can
still see that the new controller has let go of the disk, but the disk is
on solid access mode. However the Kernel does not give up it wait a few
second and I can see it starts sending some sort of RESET to all my SCSI devices
I can see that the light on all my 5 external devices light up (one at a time)
and then the kernel recovers. This works fine when I am doing something like
'find or grep' but it does not work when I am taring files onto a tape, it
ends up being an IO error and tar dies in this case.
Can someone tell me what is going on here, I can donate my time to maybe
patch the SCSI driver for the new Adaptec bios, I am sure they have changed
something since the bios comes up telling me '..... 2940/2940 W V1.23 ... 1996'
which is different than the older one '..... 2940 1995'.
The older 2940 controller has no problem. (both cntls have been used in the
same system with the same kernel).
Thx
Anoosh Atari
PS, I has posted this question to AIC7xxx@FreeBSD..... with to no responce.