Re: Mouse interrupts: the death knell of a VP6

Brent Cook
2002-04-10T17:47:46Z

On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, John Adams wrote:

> On Wednesday 10 April 2002 11:23 am, Oleg Drokin wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 09:02:05AM -0500, Brent Cook wrote:
> > > I have an ABIT VP6 motherboard, using the VIA Apollo chipset and 2
> > > 700Mhz PIII's, but please don't hold that against me. The system is
> > > running 2.4.19-pre6. I believe that I either have a system that has
> > > trouble handling a sudden bursts of interrupts, or have found a fault
> > > in mouse handling.
> >
> > Have you tried to change MPS mode to 1.1 from 1.4 (I see addres message
> > timeouts in your log)?
> >
> > > I have already tried removing memory, adding memory, changing
> > > processors, video cards. The only thing that has remained constant is
> > > the VP6 motherboard and the hard drive.
> >
> > My VP6 died on me recently with some funny symptoms:
> > it hangs in X when I start netscape and move mouse, or if I do
> > bk clone on kernel tree, it dies with
> > kernel BUG at /usr/src/linux-2.4.18/include/asm/smplock.h:62!
> > BUG in various places pretty soon.
> > (this BUG is only appears if 2 CPUs are present in motherboard).
> > So if your troubles began only recently, you might want to try another
> > motherboard just to be sure.
>
> I have a VP6 with 2 CPUs. Its has both a PS/2 mouse and a usb mouse. Its
> been up for 90 days and handled lots of mouse interrupts. See below.
> CPU0 CPU1
> 0: 392228152 392338774 IO-APIC-edge timer
> 1: 312494 312380 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
> 2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
> 3: 1 3 IO-APIC-edge serial
> 12: 40362907 40324010 IO-APIC-edge PS/2 Mouse
> 14: 3386577 3383180 IO-APIC-edge ide0
> 15: 679030 672810 IO-APIC-edge ide1
> 17: 1165246 1162993 IO-APIC-level DC395x_TRM
> 18: 83937970 83935445 IO-APIC-level ide2, eth0
> 19: 131956 132468 IO-APIC-level es1371, usb-uhci, usb-uhci
> NMI: 0 0
> LOC: 784686934 784686951
> ERR: 191
> MIS: 0

Oleg's suggestion about MPS didn't work, but it was fun. Instead of dying
instantly, a USB mouse pauses about 9 times before it finally halts. The
device in dmesg also disconnects/reconnects 9 times before it is unable to
assign a device number again to the mouse. PS/2 still locks the entire
machine. Loading and unloading usb-uhci.o does reinitialize the USB mouse
for a while, so it is fixable w/o rebooting.

This is also interesting. You appear to not have the strange ACPI device
at hardware interrupt 9 that I do. While the VP6 BIOS does not have the
option to turn off ACPI, perhaps I should try one of the hacked bioses at
abitvp6.com to turn off ACPI (maybe it is the culprit..) This is my
current situation (right after a USB lock):

CPU0 CPU1
0: 260203 267484 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 10471 10704 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 29249 29198 IO-APIC-level usb-uhci, usb-uhci
9: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge acpi
10: 13715 13332 IO-APIC-level eth0
14: 6255 5839 IO-APIC-edge ide0
15: 10 3 IO-APIC-edge ide1
NMI: 0 0
LOC: 527647 527647
ERR: 0
MIS: 0

The acpi device appears whether or not I have ACPI support in the kernel.

- Brent

> Its running a recent kernel. Maybe 2.4.18 is broken. Here's a uname -a
> Linux flash 2.5.0 #16 SMP Wed Jan 9 16:48:16 EST 2002 i686 unknown
>
> johna

2.5 exhibits similar behavior.

Thanks,
Brent