Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 14 Jun 2001 19:44:02 +0200 | From | David Monniaux <> | Subject | more on VIA 686B (trials) |
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Due to a catastrophic fan short-circuit, I was forced to exchange my 686A-based motherboard for a 686B. Bad idea!
The 686A MB (MSI-6330 aka K7T-Pro) worked perfectly well: no crashes, UDMA 66. It accepted Athlon-optimized kernels.
The 686B MB (K7T-Lite) crashed if used with DMA (any kind - mdma0 to UDMA100), whatever version of the "VIA fixes" was in place. Furthermore, upgrading to BIOS 2.7 (instead of 2.5), including a so-called "SB Live fix", made the system permanently unstable. On top of that, running an Athlon-optimized kernel (whether or not it was compile with =march=i686 (egcs-1.1.2) or -march=athlon (gcc 2.96) immediately oops and crash during /etc/rc!
I replaced this mobo+Duron with an ASUS A7V133+Athlon, which work perfectly well. Athlon-optimized kernel, UDMA100, no problem whatsoever.
So we have two kinds of problems: - *certain* 686B motherboards crash if used with an Athlon kernel (and it does not depend on the compiler options, rather on hand-made Athlon optimizations) - *certain* 686B motherboards will crash if used with any kind of DMA under heavy disk access - some 686B motherboards have absolutely no problem.
Crash test: for i in `seq 1 30` ; do echo $i; tar xfz X410src-1.tgz ; rm -rf xc; done
All the above is valid for kernel version 2.4.2-RedHat to 2.4.5ac9...
Another lesson: the MSI K7T-Lite is absolute crap. The manual sucks, and the BIOS upgrades supposed to make the machine stabler actually make it randomly hiccup (EVEN under Windows, which is what I suppose those mobos are supposed to run).
-- David Monniaux http://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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