ahcich1: Timeout on slot n port 0 interrupting FreeBSD 13.1 install.

F

fbredux

Hello,

I'm trying to install FreeBSD 13.1 on a Lenovo E545 Laptop.

A SunplusIT Inc. integrated camera is interrupting installation.

Initially I get:
Root mount waiting for:CAM
Root mount waiting for:ahcich1: Timeout on slot n port 0

After 2-3 screens of timeouts, the install menu appears and ahcich1: Timeouts continue, overwriting install menu options.

The camera does work under Windows 10.

How do I ignore the camera?
 
Funnily enough I'm also trying to get FreeBSD to work properly on that very same laptop. I successfully installed FreeBSD fighting through the kernel spam that hinders entering the setup info. After installing, on reboot, selecting multiuser mode without enabling safe mode starts loading the kernel and resets the machine. When you enable safe mode then the machine boots but it then hangs with the "Root mount waiting for: CAM" spam again. After a while it goes on booting sucessfully. I then disabled sending kernel spam to the console by adding boot_mute="YES" in /boot/loader.conf. I set up WiFi and updated FreeBSD. I noticed there was an update to cam.ko. But no joy, the kernel still crashes and resets the machine on boot if you don't enable safe mode and the CAM spam is still happening on boot in the background. So is there a magic incantation? Or is the solution to my problem to suffer with the unbearable sluggishness of OpenBSD or having a third Linux laptop?

Great laptop btw. Works great out of the box with Linux and no CPU backdoor.
 
OK, so here we have two users who need to learn a lot.

As SirDice already said: CAM has nothing to do with camera. It has everything to do with disks.

The original post and thread title from fbredux even quotes the error message: "Root mount waiting for:ahcich1: Timeout on slot n port 0". So let's see what the problem here might be: There was a timeout. Everyone knows what a timeout is? It's the kernel saying "I did something to a piece of hardware, that piece of hardware should have responded, but it didn't, so I have to assume it is broken". What piece of hardware might it be? Says right there in the error message: Device type AHCI, channel 1. What is ahci? Look at the man page ahci(4), it's all clearly documented. It is the SATA interface on the motherboard.

At this point, the diagnosis is already clear: We have a defective disk drive (likely), a defective disk interface (unlikely), or a compatibility problem between FreeBSD and this particular hardware (possible, but I find it very hard to believe).

Now, to make matters more interesting, it seems that dpirate isn't even willing to diagnose the problem. They keep referring to the messages as "spam", and they even disabled seeing error messages.

My advice would be: When booting, carefully read all the messages, and see where things start going wrong. And try to understand the messages, for example figuring out what system they are referring to, by looking at the man pages.
 
It would be helpful to get more hardware information. Things like dmesg output (but it could be hard to capture because of the continuous error messages), pciconf -lv output, etc.
It's possible that there is an AHCI controller that actually has only one port / channel, but FreeBSD thinks that it has two and the problem comes from trying to use the non-existent channel.
 
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