Girish Venkatachalam wrote:

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> Hello friends,

>

> I am having a great deal of handicap with OpenBSD since I am unable to

> use/access my SATA DVD drives. The machine would freeze and do nothing

> till I reboot. ( I am running 4.0, it used to sometimes work with an old

> installation)

upgrade.  4.2 will be out in two days.  Do it.  Or use a snapshot today.
> Here is the excerpt from dmesg.

...

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> Even now I do not wish to jump the gun and conclude a problem before I

> try the 4.2 image. In case the problem persists I wish to know how I can

> fix it.

No, you NEED to upgrade to 4.2.  4.0 is going out of support in two days.

Upgrades have to be a part of your life.  You should be at 4.1 now, your

problems may no longer exist.  Even before you say "I have a problem",

you need to be upgraded.
> The problem:

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>

> Every time I access the CD with the mount command, the machine freezes

> mandating a hard reboot. Even if I try a "dvd+rw-format -f /dev/rcd0c"

> it would hang.

>

> Whilst installing from the CD ( not official), I can proceed till

> the "extracting distributions" stage since the BIOS driver does the job

> for you. Once the OpenBSD kernel tries to read the CD, the installation

> process would hang. The way I got around this is by pointing it to a

> local FTP server for the distributions.

>

> I am concerned since I cannot use ddb ( apparently ) to figure out what

> is going on.

>

> How are such problems usually diagnosed?

step 1: run the newest code, see if someone long ago fixed it.

Don't even think about a step 2 until step 1 is completed.
> In case you wish to see the complete dmesg on my Intel 82801 chipset,

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> please take a look.

>

> http://www.sirsasana.org/misc/girish-dmesg.txt

>

> Once I fix it I shall send the patch at the earliest. I have a bunch of

> other patches with me too (mostly for USB NIC drivers )...

No one wants to see a patch against 4.0.
Few even want to see a patch against 4.2 (only wackos that like to see

"-stable" on the end of their Frankenstein systems).

Developers are past that now, they are working on what will become 4.3.

That's where the work is being done.  If you wish to contribute code,

you will need to be running -current.
SATA DVD drives are relatively new.  They caused a lot of little issues

in all the OSs I tried them on when I first came across them.  I'm not

surprised 4.0 had issues.  Find out of 4.2 or -current solves them.
Nick.