Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 17 Oct 2001 06:45:11 -0500 (CDT) | From | grouch <> | Subject | Re: VIA chipset |
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First, my apologies to the list subscribers and to the person responding privately to my questions. I assumed that person was posting to the list and CC'ing replies to me, since I am not subscribed to the list. My replies were CC'ed to the list because of that. The assumption was wrong and the result is that I was rudely posting my half of a private conversation to this public mailing list. Sorry.
Second, the system lockups appear to be cured! It appears to be a problem with using Ultra ATA/100 drives on an Award BIOS + VIA chipset motherboard that only supports up to Ultra ATA/33 drives. Note that even the tests I ran with the BIOS set to disable UDMA and the kernel configured to not use UDMA resulted in system hangs.
First clue came from a single line about (of all things, Windows 95) on page 51 of this document from IBM: djna-dpta-dtla_digw.pdf . It warns of system hangs when a UDMA 100 or UDMA 66 drive is used on some UDMA 33 or lower motherboards.
Using the IBM Drive Feature Tool at http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/ibmftool-install-img.bin I set the IBM-DTLA-305040 drive to report and use UDMA 33. This utility http://www.wdc.com/service/ftp/dlgtools/dlgmaker.exe was used to do the same for a WDC AC26400R drive.
I've only tested it for a night, shuffling a few G's of data around, but much less was needed to lock the system under 2.4.x before. I have no clue why it never locked using the default Debian 2.2.18pre21 kernel, why it locked quickly with any 2.4.x kernel, why it locked only occasionally with a 2.2.x kernel with ext3, nor why it appears stable now.
Maybe this will save someone else some frustration. Then again, maybe it's a fluke caused by the phase of the moon when the mobo was made.
Terry Vessels
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