Booting Solaris[TM] 2.6 on an Enterprise[TM] 450 or 4/30 can cause the machine to panic

Asset ID:	1-72-1002958.1
Update Date:	2017-02-01
Keywords:

Solution Type Problem Resolution Sure

Solution 1002958.1 : Booting Solaris[TM] 2.6 on an Enterprise[TM] 450 or 4/30 can cause the machine to panic

Applies to:

Sun Ultra 30 Workstation - Version Not Applicable and later
Sun Enterprise 450 Server - Version All Versions and later
All Platforms

Symptoms

Under certain conditions/configurations an Enterprise 450 (Tazmo) or 4/30 (Quark) will fail to boot Solaris 2.6 via CD-ROM, net or disk. The bug 4065612 resides in the glm driver which controls the Symbios
53c825 and 53c875 SCSI chip on these two machines. The bug was introduced whilst providing support for QFull and ARQ pkts, causing the glm driver to either free memory (unit and dsa) structures of targets that don't
exist or use the recently freed memory of a target structure. Thus, depending upon timing and alignment of the glm unit structures relative to page boundaries, the machine may either panic or appear to function fine.

Cause

(Read Symptoms, above)

Solution

From the Euro SMCC CTE home page (http://otis.uk):
In many cases it is possible to work around the problem. This can be done by either changing the hardware configuration (i.e., reducing CPUS and number of Disks) and/or booting with kadb as this will effect where the
glm unit structures are placed in memory, the trick being to make sure they don't cross a page boundary. In many cases running the machine in uni-processor allows the user to install the machine.  
This could be done by typing the following:

boot cdrom kadb -d
kadb:
kadb: kernel/unix
Size: 272825+60132+70328 Bytes
/platform/sun4u/kernel/unix loaded - 0x94000 bytes used
stopped at _start: sethi %hi(0x10006400), %g1
kadb[0]: use_mp/W 0
use_mp: 0x1 = 0x0
kadb[0]: :c

If the machine proceeds to boot and does not panic, then install the machine and apply patch 105580-01 or later, available from the official patch database.
Should the above not be possible or the problem persist, please fill in the information below to confirm whether or not the problem is related to the one discussed.

NOTE:
This problem is specific to Solaris 2.6 only, and relates to the Tazmo and Quark family of machines (platforms). The fix will be integrated into the next release of Solaris.
All other releases of Solaris supported on these platforms are NOT susceptible to this problem.

Product
Sun Enterprise 450 Server
Solaris 2.6 Operating System
Ultra 30 Workstation

Attachments

This solution has no attachment