We're trying to install NetBSD-current on a new 32MB, 66MHz i486DX2
VLB box here at Kaleida, and are have some troubles making it live
upto it's potential.

The machine is using a BT455S (Rev E, Firmware 3.37) SCSI adaptor
connected to Fujitsu 1.2MB SCSI2 hard disk.

Everything works perfectly (albeit slow) when the controller is
switched to limit i/o to 5MB/s.  But we haven't been as lucky when
10MB/s synchronous mode is enabled.

We were able to install the entire system without incident, but
occasionally it gets into a mode where it reports constant "non-media
hardware failures".  After it gets into this mode, the only solution
is a reset.  This seems to happen more often when we "push" the disk.
For example, when using iozone to test disk performance, it got
confused much more often after we used tunefs to change the rotdelay
to 0ms.

Since the error was intermittent, I thought that perhaps we had a SCSI
termination problem.  But the problems still occured after I added a
my WangDAT 3200 as the last device on the chain.  

I took the system home and put its drive on my machine (32MB 50MHz
i486DX EISA with 1742A adaptor).  It worked perfectly, much, much
faster than the Maxtor P012S that I purchased only a year ago.  Then I
generated a new kernel for my machine and put my disk in the new
machine.  Again no problems.

This morning we tried to install FreeBSD 1.1 to see if handled the
machine any better; but the install floppies hung and we didn't get to
try it.

Any ideas?

	--jtc

P.S.: I just noticed that there is a SCSIDEBUG kernel option.  If we
generate a new kernel with this option turned on would it be possible
for someone to figure out what's going wrong?








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