Anyone have a working copy of the GVP SCSI-II Driver for Amiga Unix?

Hi everyone,

I've been trying to get Amiga Unix to boot off of a GVP SCSI controller, which I have been able to - to some degree. However, I have yet to be able to build a Kernel that is bootable.

I used the files that were supposedly from the "Gateway CD" to install Amiga Unix on an A2000 with a G-Force combo card. The install went smoothly, however I was having some trouble getting the system to boot from the hard disk - so I was relegated to using the GVP boot floppy to start the system. I did manage to overcome that hurdle. The background and the solution can be found here: Amiga Unix Booting with GVP SCSI-II and How does one add a file to the RDB of a Hard Disk?.

I figured I'd post here as there seems to be some more traffic in this Amiga Unix forum than in the other.

Anyway, after some adjustments, I was only able to get the hard disk to boot by copying the bootable floppy disk image to the boot partition. Any kernel I try to make boots into a kernel panic - not able to mount the root file system. I tried making a boot floppy from one of my new kernels, and it doesn't look like it even tries to access the hard disk.

I've checked to make sure that the patches have been applied. They are relatively simple. Unfortunately, the driver is only provided in object format, not the original source. So I'm left with few options.

Hope someone can help.

Regards,

Mack

So I now have an A2000 with a GVP Combo card working. Aside from finding that I was being an idiot, here is what I found:

The patch works perfectly fine, the problem was my system date at the time I applied the patch. Because Amiga Unix does not like post 2000 clock dates without first replacing the setclock binary, Amiga Unix starts up with a 1977 date. I ignored this when I applied the patch. The patch changed the kernel.c file and the sd.c file and added a gvp_11.o file. While make always seems to make the kernel.c file, it was not making the sd.c file. I noticed this when I made some changed to sd.c to try to debug what was going on. When I went to rebuild, I saw that gcc never ran on sd.c. So I made the directory clean, and things worked. On a subsequent installation, I just changed the date to a late 90s date, and sd.c was rebuilt.

So that's it - just a bad date.

Regards,

Mack

[Noth]

I'm trying this in WinUAE 3.2 and the drive attached to the GVP series II card (using either version of the rom) on UID 0 isn't being detected after using the inst.gvp.dd disk image to boot to the root AMIX installer. Anyone else tried this?

[Toni Wilen]

Use -scsiemulog command line parameter to see if there is any SCSI hardware accesses. (device not detected/support vs failed scsi commands)

[Noth]

Thanks Toni but nothing shows...

[Toni Wilen]

Log shows no Z2 boards, it looks like GVP isn't fully configured.

[Noth]

Well I selected the GVP series II card in the Expansions window, and gave it a rom... Is there something more to do to activate it? Add a line in the gvp-amix.uae file maybe ?

[Toni Wilen]

It was a bug, A3000 built-in SCSI with any other WD based SCSI controller didn't work correctly (and also prevented any following Z2/Z3 board to work), A3000 SCSI appeared as empty Z2 board..

http://www.winuae.net/files/b/winuae.7z should fix it.

[Noth]

Now it fails to open the HDF:

11-310 [6485 000-000]: hfd attempting to open: 'C:\users\Public\Documents\Amiga Files\WinUAE\gvp-amix.hdf'
11-310 [6485 000-000]: HDF 'C:\users\Public\Documents\Amiga Files\WinUAE\gvp-amix.hdf' failed to open. error = -1

Thanks for looking into this Toni!

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Noth

Now it fails to open the HDF:

This is normal if it happens when opening harddrives GUI and emulation is already running. It tries to open the file to show state of HDF in GUI but can't because it is already opened in exclusive mode (=writable) by the SCSI emulator.

[Noth]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

This is normal if it happens when opening harddrives GUI and emulation is already running. It tries to open the file to show state of HDF in GUI but can't because it is already opened in exclusive mode (=writable) by the SCSI emulator.

OK but the installer still can't see the drive...

[Toni Wilen]

Does GVP even work properly with A3000? (or A4000).

All Z2 boards have 24-bit addressing limit = onboard DMA controller can't access any A3000 mainboard Fast RAM.

[mark_k]

The driver should handle that, you'd have the same issue with the controller in an A2000 with accelerator (32-bit RAM) (and NetBSD or whatever that supports that config).

[Noth]

The A2500 could run AMIX... That's what I've tried tonight but the kernel seems to hang on hw detection (KS1.3+A2091+A2630/8Mb Fast RAM+1Mb Chip RAM+ ECS Agnus+A2065). Same if you replace the A2091 with the GVP card. KS3.1 for A2000 won't even start with this config.

A3000 with GVP no dice.

[mark_k]

Were you installing from scratch or trying to use a pre-installed HDF with your A2500 config?

[Noth]

Originally Posted by mark_k

Were you installing from scratch or trying to use a pre-installed HDF with your A2500 config?

From scratch.

[mark_k]

Did you have the root install floppy write-enabled?

Attached are a bunch of AMIX-related WinUAE configs. I'm sure some/most work, but it's been a while and I can't be bothered to run through the installation process with each one. (Remove .zip from the filename before unpacking.)

[Noth]

Originally Posted by mark_k

Did you have the root install floppy write-enabled?

Attached are a bunch of AMIX-related WinUAE configs. I'm sure some/most work, but it's been a while and I can't be bothered to run through the installation process with each one. (Remove .zip from the filename before unpacking.)

Yep, always on write-enabled. I don't usually start from scratch but for the GVP method I thought it might be better... Thanks for the configs, I'll give those a spin soon but right now I'm trying to get a working setup so I can compile libxpm ... Found it in the contrib dir for X11R5 hosted at ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/X11/X11R5/. If I can ever get it to work, it opens up a few possibilities for windowmanagers...