Re: Via KT133 pci corruption: stock 2.4.18pre2 oopses as well

[Martin Josefsson]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Martin Josefsson wrote:
> > We've replaved that memory module now and now it's better but I have to
> > say that the KT133 or atleast the Asus A7V motherboard seems to be quite
> > broken. we have a lot of spurious irq's and the ide controllers freak when
> > but under some load and start getting irq timeouts and resets the ide
> > channels over and over again with some delay in between when it kind of
> > works, slow as hell but works.
> 
> Well, my A7V is also acting up, with spurious IRQs (but not too many), and
> PCI lockups if the load on the PCI bus increases too much -- this is
> probably the last time I ever buy a VIA board (because they take soooo much
> time to acknowledge their screw ups and help people fix it) unless they
> start issuing non-binary-only fixes (heck, all it takes is a doc telling us
> what to do on the PCI registers!).
> 
> The IDE corruption and lockups you can fix, just apply the latest IDE
> patches, the 2.4.18pre IDE subsystem is not to be used on a KT133, it will
> not work at all if you give it a slightly bigger load on the promise
> controller, for example.
> 
> > We are going to replace the motherboard with one with VIA KT266A chipset,
> > hope that works better.
> 
> Without the IDE patches, it will (most probably) not help.

I am using the IDE patch. I've heard that the A7V133 which is based on the
KT133A chipset works much better in linux. I know people using it in a
router for a 1000 client network on a 100Mbit connection and it's working
fine, no problems at all. If we push the networking too hard we get a lot
of spurious interrupts and it appears as we loose some interrupts aswell
as NIC drivers and IDE drivers start complaining sometimes and when it has
started loosing interrupts only a reboot can bring it back to
"normal" operation.

/Martin

Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.