LSI Logic (formerly Symbios Logic or NCR) 53C810, 53C810A, 53C815, 53C820, 53C825, 53C825A, 53C860, 53C875, 53C875J, 53C876, 53C895 HBAs

Preconfiguration Information

Known Problems and Limitations

• Because the NCR BIOS and the Solaris fdisk program may be incompatible, use the DOS version of FDISK (or equivalent utility) to create an entry in the FDISK partition table before installing the Solaris software. Create at least a 1-cylinder DOS partition starting at cylinder 0. If the DOS partition isn't created, the system won't reboot after Solaris installation.

• An add-in card with the 53C815, 53C820, 53C825, or 53C825A controller can only be used in a bus-mastering PCI slot. On motherboards with only two PCI slots, both of the PCI slots are usually bus-master capable. On motherboards with three or more PCI slots, and on motherboards with several embedded PCI controllers, some of the PCI slots may not be bus-master capable.

• Some PCI motherboards with the LSI Logic SDMS BIOS and an embedded 53C810 or 53C810A controller do not work correctly with the 53C82x family of add-in cards that also have an LSI Logic SDMS BIOS. Upgrading the motherboard BIOS, the add-in card, or both may prevent these conflicts.

• On some early PCI systems with the 53C810 chip on the motherboard, the interrupt pin on the chip is not connected. Such a system cannot be used with Solaris software.

• Do not attempt to connect wide targets to the narrow connector of the cards listed as supporting narrow disks. These configurations are not supported.

• The Solaris ncrs driver does not support the Wide SCSI option. Some add-in 53C8xx cards include connectors for both narrow cables (8-bit SCSI A cables) and wide cables (16-bit SCSI P cables). You can connect devices to the SCSI Wide connectors using SCSI P cables, but the Solaris ncrs driver will not initiate or accept the Wide Data Transfer option. The attached devices will function in 8-bit narrow mode.

• If your adapter supports the LSI Logic SCSI Configuration utility, which can be accessed by pressing Control-C, do not change the value of the Host SCSI ID (an option under the Adapter Setup menu) to anything but 7.

• If you experience problems with old target devices, add the following entry to the /kernel/drv/ncrs.conf file:

  targetN-scsi-options = 0x0;

  where N is the ID of the failing target.

• If you are using a Conner 10805 narrow SCSI drive, you might see warnings like:

  WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci1000,f@d(ncrs0): invalid reselection(0,0) WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci1000,f@d/sd@0,0(sd0): SCSI transport failed: 'reset: retrying command'

  You can suppress these warnings by disabling tagged queuing in the ncrs.conf file. See the ncrs(7D) man page.

• On some Pentium motherboards (Intel NX chipset) using P90 or slower processors, ncrs hangs and this message is displayed on the console:

  WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci1000,3@6(ncrs0) Unexpected DMA state:active dstat=c0<DMA-FIFO-empty, master-data-parity-error>

  This is an unrecoverable state; the system will not install using the ncrs driver.

• The ncrs driver supports Revision 4 and above of the 53C875 chipset. Previous revisions were pre-release versions of the chip, so there might still be a few in circulation.

• In rare circumstances, when using an SDT7000/SDT9000 tape drive, you see this message on the console:

  Unexpected DMA state: ACTIVE. dstat=81<DMA-FIFO-empty,illegal-instruction>

  In these instances, the system recovers and the tape drive remains usable. You can still use the tar command to add or extract files to or from the tape in the drive.