'vintage' via dma bug

'vintage' via dma bug

[febo]

I have the misfortune to run a rather old PIII machine with a VIA chipset, 
a Fedora Core 1 distro with 2.4.22 kernel and two PATA hard mirrored hard 
disk, on two separate channels, both set to primary. I've experienced some 
data corruption lately and after much googling I've found that 4-5 years 
ago some via chipset experienced a similar problem with dma transfers, 
especially with hard disk configured the very same way as my setup. The bug 
was fixed, I gather, in 2.4.4. I've upgrade the kernel to 2.6.10 (the 
latest Fedora legacy core *TWO* kernel, with fingers crossed) but the 
corruption problems usually start to pop up only after a few weeks of 
uptime, especially under relatively heavy load.
I couldn't find more precise pointers after all these years so I'd like to 
know if that bug really affected my chipset, and if 2.6.10 is a valid 
solution.. 

the kernel identifies the chipset at boot:


# dmesg | fgrep -i via
ACPI: DSDT (v001    VIA APOLLO-P 0x00001000 MSFT 0x0100000b) @ 0x00000000
PCI: Via IRQ fixup
agpgart: Detected VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset
VP_IDE: VIA vt82c686a (rev 22) IDE UDMA66 controller on pci0000:00:07.1
parport_pc: VIA 686A/8231 detected
parport_pc: VIA parallel port: io=0x378, irq=7

# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C693A/694x [Apollo PRO133x] 
(rev
 c4)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C598/694x [Apollo 
MVP3/Pro133x AG
P]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] 
(rev 22
)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. 
VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/
C/VT8235 PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 10)
00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6202 [USB 2.0 controller] 
(rev
10)
00:07.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6202 [USB 2.0 controller] 
(rev
10)
00:07.4 SMBus: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 30)
00:0e.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 
08)
00:0f.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 
08)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL AGP 2X (rev 
27)

Re: 'vintage' via dma bug

[Dave Jones]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 08:36:00PM +0200, febo@delenda.net wrote:
 > I have the misfortune to run a rather old PIII machine with a VIA chipset, 
 > a Fedora Core 1 distro with 2.4.22 kernel and two PATA hard mirrored hard 
 > disk, on two separate channels, both set to primary. I've experienced some 
 > data corruption lately and after much googling I've found that 4-5 years 
 > ago some via chipset experienced a similar problem with dma transfers, 
 > especially with hard disk configured the very same way as my setup. The bug 
 > was fixed, I gather, in 2.4.4. I've upgrade the kernel to 2.6.10 (the 
 > latest Fedora legacy core *TWO* kernel, with fingers crossed) but the 
 > corruption problems usually start to pop up only after a few weeks of 
 > uptime, especially under relatively heavy load.
 > I couldn't find more precise pointers after all these years so I'd like to 
 > know if that bug really affected my chipset, and if 2.6.10 is a valid 
 > solution.. 

I'm puzzled why you upgraded from one end-of-life'd distro to
another ancient end-of-life'd distro.   You're more likely to get
interest from the upstream developers if you're running
something recent.  Even _I_ don't remember what was good/bad
in the Fedora kernels from that era, and I built them :-)

		Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk

Re: 'vintage' via dma bug

[febo]

On 7/18/06, Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>
> I'm puzzled why you upgraded from one end-of-life'd distro to
> another ancient end-of-life'd distro.   You're more likely to get
> interest from the upstream developers if you're running
> something recent.  Even _I_ don't remember what was good/bad
> in the Fedora kernels from that era, and I built them :-)

 Quite simply, the damn thing is 350 km away from where I am, and I
can't just shut it down completely to reinstall or better yet swap it
with some decent and newer hardware. So I found that FC1 could be
upgraded with a 2.6 fedora RPM and found the 'nearest' at fedora
legacy and upgrade the kernel in 5 minutes.
Essentialy I'd like to find some confirmation/pointer regarding 1) if
the bug really affects my chipset 2) if 2.6.10 still has the fix, it
should have it of course, but...