Re: sata_nv + SMP = broken?

[Marc Perkel <marc@perkel.com>]

Vladimir Lazarenko wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Yesterday I've tried launching various kernels on Ahtlon64 Dual-core 
> X2 3800+ with MSI Neo4 Platinum SLI motherboard.
>
> The results were a total catastrophica failure. As soon as I enable 
> SMP in the kernel, the sata driver would randomly hang after a bit of 
> disk activity.
>
> Whenever apic is enabled, the system won't even be able to boot up 
> completely, and will hang VERY soon. Whenever I disable apic, the 
> system is able to bootup, but when the software mirror that I use will 
> try to resync for 2-3-10 mins, it will throw up a message and freeze 
> again.
>
> Whenever I disable apic AND lapic, the system is able to bootup AND 
> work, however after same 5-10 minutes it start spitting messages, 
> which are somewhat different thou and don't hang the system completely 
> but render it rather unusable anyway.
>
> As soon as I disable SMP - everything works like a charm.
>

For what it's worth I too have seen this same problem. It happens when I 
use the stock Fedora kernels but not my custom compiled kernel. I'm not 
sure what I compiled differently but at the time I thought that 
something in the new kernel fixed it.

I too am running an Athlon X2 using sata_nv. I have an ASUS motherboard. 
But what I noticed was that the problem went away if I used 2 gigs of 
ram instead of 4 gigs. When you use the whole 4 gigs there is some 
memory mapping going on and I thought perhaps the problem was related to 
the sata_nv not liking the memory mapped over the 4gig barrier. I did 
not try disabling SMP.