Re: VIA based motherboards

[Ryan Butler]

On Thu, 2001-12-27 at 20:57, Trever L. Adams wrote:
> Ok, I had read several reviews of the Soyo Dragon Plus saying it was
> great and stable with Linux (kt266a based board).
> 
> I have a Micron 256 Meg DDR DIMM in my system.  With my Permedia 2 video
> card and my hard drives (and every built in thing turned off and all
> other components not mentioned removed) the system crashes at boot if I
> let Linux use all 256 Meg.  If I say mem=240M it works fine (as far as I
> have seen).  If I say anything over 240M, either it hangs when trying to
> print out the partition table check on boot, or it hangs in the SCSI
> card driver for my Symbios 876 based card (if it is in... maybe if it is
> out, didn't check).
> 

I have a single 512 meg DDR DIMM and have not experienced the problem
you are.

> test, around 9 passes I believe, the tests passed with no problems.  My
> system hung around 8 hours later with all keyboard LED lights on, it
> rebooted and started running the test again.  The keyboard stayed hung
> until power was physically removed from the computer AND keyboard was
> unplugged and plugged back in.
> 

Just to relate another lockup mystery with the K7 Soyo Dragon Plus,
after install it would lockup within 3-20 minutes repeatedly under
2.4.16, 2.4.9, and 2.4.2.  I messed around in the bios until I mangaged
to get most of the cards on their own interrupts, still locked hard.

The only way I was able to get the system stable was to remove the 2
3c905 (one was a straight 905, one was a 905C-TXM) from the system.  I
replaced them with a 3c590 and its been stable ever since.

Ryan Butler
[e-mail]