Re: Problem with 2.0.24 SCSI change

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi)
Thu, 31 Oct 1996 07:36:56 +0200 (EET)


On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Chris Adams wrote:
>
> I am running 2.0.24 (with the no_atime patch) on a news server. I have
> two SCSI adapters in it: an Adaptec 2940 and a DPT 3224. I have the OS
> & swap on sda and the history file on sdb attached to the Adaptec and a
> big RAID array for news spool attached to the DPT. When I boot up with
> 2.0.24, I get "Unable to open initial console" and everything stops. I
> finally realized that the DPT was suddenly being detected first. I had
> to change drivers/scsi/hosts.c to get the Adaptec back first. I have 2
> questions:
>
> 1) Why was the DPT moved above the Adaptec in 2.0.24?

That was a mistake - I let a patch go by that should never had passed
into the 2.0.x tree.

I hope it didn't bite many people (it should have bit only people with
multiple adapters, one of which was a DPT): those it bit please just reverse
the change to hosts.c in 2.0.24.

> 2) Is there not a better way to get the order of multiple host adapters?

There is no really good way to order different host adapters. There are many
different ways it can be done, and none of them are the RightWay(tm). You can
do it by adapter type, by card position on the bus (where known) or by
position in IO space, and none of the ways are very good. They all fail
sometimes (moving the card around or just switching cards), but the kind
of failure you see in 2.0.24 is just plain stupid (when it changes just
because the kernel looks in a different order).

Linus