Hi all,
I finally got our tyan s2891 to boot LinuxBIOS (the ck804 chipset can't emulate SATA disks as IDE, so you need linux-as-a-bootloader + kexec to make it boot), but it turns out there are some issues with SATA.
This machine has 4 sata ports, to three of which a drive is connected. All drives are identical.
I'm testing using a stock 2.6.22.6, 64 bit, no special boot parameters.
When booted into the proprietary BIOS, all three drives are properly and swiftly detected during boot.
There is a bit of confusion: the Linux kernel sees sata controller 1 as the second controller, and sata controller 2 as the first.
The drives are physically connected to sata controller 1 (drive 1,2) and sata controller 2 (drive 3). Position 4 on sata controller 2 is empty.
The kernel sees the drives as controller 1 position 2, and controller 2 position 3,4.
When booting with LinuxBIOS, only one of the drives is detected. (as it so happens, drive 3 on sata controller 2). The drive in position 4 on controller 2 is half detected as you'll see in the logs - the drive type is read out, but detection times out.
The drive at position 2 on controller 1 is not detected at all.
I have saved boot logs, lspci -vvvnx, lspci, lshw and x86info -mp output, all of which you can find here:
http://ward.vandewege.net/s2891/
The linuxbios boot log is somewhat complicated - you'll see the machine boots a stripped-down 2.6.22.2 first (from rom, LAB), and then kexecs into a full-fledged 2.6.22.6.
The system does boot eventually, but only because those 3 drives happen to be configured as software raid-1. It also takes a long time for the system to come up, because the sata detection on the drive in position 4 times out for both kernels.
Any thoughts?
Thanks, Ward.