potential initialisation problem in the aic94xx

I'm not sure if this is a genuine problem, or I just happen to have a broken card: Since the card is unusual in being keyed 3.3v only, I don't actually have any working x86 machine I can try it in.

The symptoms I see on my ia64 box are that as soon as the driver tries to touch the Region 0 BAR via mmio, the system gives me a MCE. This is probably because the card fails to respond on this address and thus gives some type of PCI bus timeout. My suspicion is that the card requires some firmware setup that the on-board BIOS does before the BARs respond (and since this is an ia64 box, it doesn't run the BIOS). Could someone (i.e. Jeff) with access to the Docs have a look and see if this suspicion can be verified (or someone with a card try it in an ia64 to see if the same symptoms are observed)?

Thanks,

James

OK, I am sure now. I've found an x86_64 machine with 3.3v slots and verified that this card does work.

Therefore, we have a serious bug in the aic94xx driver init code. It's clearly relying on something to set it up correctly in the BIOS rather than doing everything in the driver init routine. This means (unless corrected) that the card will only work on x86 like platforms.

James

... and it won't work when hotplugged, even on an x86 platform.