Re: AMD Athlon + VIA Crashing On Disk I/O

[Martin Eriksson]

----- Original Message -----
From: "E M Recio" <[e-mail]>
To: <[e-mail]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 3:28 PM
Subject: AMD Athlon + VIA Crashing On Disk I/O

> Hiya,
>
> I have an AMD Athlon 1.2 with a VIA 8259A Chipset (see bottom). If I
> compile the kernel with the Athlon option it crashes all the time. In
> fact, I can't even get Redhat 7.2 installed without a core dump when it
> tries to mount the filesystem. With the later kernels, it doesn't core
> dump, but just freezes.
>
> IE: If I have ide-scsi module loaded, and I try to access the floppy
> drive, it locks up the machine (regardless of whether cputype is Athlon
> or K6.)
>
> IE: Updatedb locks up the machine.
>
> I get (when FSCK):
>
> spurious 8259A IRQ7

This is not the VIA chipset, it's the "8259A interrupt controller".

> Does anyone know if there's a bug fix for this chipset? My board is
> made from FIC (crappy, instructions don't even matchup). I used to be
> able to fix it by changing the CPU type to K6 but that doesn't work now
> with the later kernels (2.4.15 and up.)

First check out what kind of chipset you really have;
lspci -xs 0:0
should do the thing. Post the results.

In the meantime, you can try to compile for
"Pentium-Pro/Celeron/Pentium-II", and check your BIOS settings one more time
(set stuff to "safe" values). Also, do you have a really recent kernel, such
as 2.4.18? There were some changes in the Athlon/VIA "quirks" department a
while ago, but after 2.4.15 (i think).

 _____________________________________________________
|  Martin Eriksson <[e-mail]>
|  MSc CSE student, department of Computing Science
|  Umeå University, Sweden