nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Samuel Kvasnica]

Hello,

Last few weeks I spent quite much time trying to get working two nforce2 
chipset based motherboards with latest linux 2.4.22 - ASUS A7N8 Deluxe 
2.0 and
MSI K7N2 Delta. Althought the latest kernel version already detects 
correctly all the nforce2 stuff and APIC seems to run work as well,
some random lockups still remain. At the very beginning I believed I 
could get rid of lockups by setting lower udma mode on IDE (hdparm -X 
udma3).
In the fact this only reduced very much the probability of lockups - 
with udma5 I could freeze the system within few minutes e.g. during 
kernel compilation.
with udma3 system is usually stable for several days, but sometimes it 
locks. When it happens, it happens mostly during first 30 mins after boot.
I'm booting with noapic, nolapic and acpi=off, but it doesn't seem to 
have really any effect on lockups.
Unfortunatelly, I can't get any debug info. I've redirected syslog to 
flash-card but didn't get even a bit more of info, it seems to blow-up
the chipset completelly and immediatelly.

Now, in the system with MSI K7N2 motherboard I have a framegrabber 
(Hauppauge PVR-250) installed, using ivtv driver.
I'm able to lock-up the system when streaming uncompressed video (e.g. 
cat /dev/yuv0 >/dev/null) and the lockups are also hard, w/o debug info.
The ivtv driver is using DMA very heavily  but seems to work on other 
chipsets. So these lock-up problems might be rather DMA then APIC related.
Interesting is that I've never had such a lock-up when running WinXP on 
same computer ( :-) seems impossible), even under load and with the 
framegrabber.
I've run memtest on both machines for 24 hours, it shouldn't  be bad 
memory. On both machines I'm using just onboard hardware, except for the 
AGP graphic card
(matrox and nvidia) and the framegrabber. Hard disk is on parallel IDE, 
SATA controller is disabled.

So my conclusion is that the nforce2 lock-ups are still unsolved at the 
moment. Any nforce experts around ?

Please, reply directly using cc:, I'm not on the list.

thanks,

Sam

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Matt H.]

Turn off apic in the bios.. it should then work well .. 


On Tuesday 21 October 2003 11:01 am, Samuel Kvasnica wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Last few weeks I spent quite much time trying to get working two nforce2
> chipset based motherboards with latest linux 2.4.22 - ASUS A7N8 Deluxe
> 2.0 and
> MSI K7N2 Delta. Althought the latest kernel version already detects
> correctly all the nforce2 stuff and APIC seems to run work as well,
> some random lockups still remain. At the very beginning I believed I
> could get rid of lockups by setting lower udma mode on IDE (hdparm -X
> udma3).
> In the fact this only reduced very much the probability of lockups -
> with udma5 I could freeze the system within few minutes e.g. during
> kernel compilation.
> with udma3 system is usually stable for several days, but sometimes it
> locks. When it happens, it happens mostly during first 30 mins after boot.
> I'm booting with noapic, nolapic and acpi=off, but it doesn't seem to
> have really any effect on lockups.
> Unfortunatelly, I can't get any debug info. I've redirected syslog to
> flash-card but didn't get even a bit more of info, it seems to blow-up
> the chipset completelly and immediatelly.
>
> Now, in the system with MSI K7N2 motherboard I have a framegrabber
> (Hauppauge PVR-250) installed, using ivtv driver.
> I'm able to lock-up the system when streaming uncompressed video (e.g.
> cat /dev/yuv0 >/dev/null) and the lockups are also hard, w/o debug info.
> The ivtv driver is using DMA very heavily  but seems to work on other
> chipsets. So these lock-up problems might be rather DMA then APIC related.
> Interesting is that I've never had such a lock-up when running WinXP on
> same computer ( :-) seems impossible), even under load and with the
> framegrabber.
> I've run memtest on both machines for 24 hours, it shouldn't  be bad
> memory. On both machines I'm using just onboard hardware, except for the
> AGP graphic card
> (matrox and nvidia) and the framegrabber. Hard disk is on parallel IDE,
> SATA controller is disabled.
>
> So my conclusion is that the nforce2 lock-ups are still unsolved at the
> moment. Any nforce experts around ?
>
> Please, reply directly using cc:, I'm not on the list.
>
> thanks,
>
> Sam
>
>
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Vitez Gabor]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 11:13:00AM -0700, Matt H. wrote:
> Turn off apic in the bios.. it should then work well .. 
> 
> On Tuesday 21 October 2003 11:01 am, Samuel Kvasnica wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Last few weeks I spent quite much time trying to get working two nforce2
> > chipset based motherboards with latest linux 2.4.22 - ASUS A7N8 Deluxe
> > 2.0 and
> > MSI K7N2 Delta. Althought the latest kernel version already detects
> ..

If turning off APIC doesn't solve the problem, try a kernel with 
LOCAL APIC support turned off. 


	Gabor

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Samuel Kvasnica]

Gabor,

I'm booting the kernel with acpi=off, noapic and nolapic options and 
according to syslog it is really disabled. Lockups are very rare (they 
come either during
30mins after boot or never) but I cat get them very quickly when using 
the framegrabber with ivtv driver. The ivtv driver itself works rock 
solid on older PIII system
(btw, that PIII runs SMP kernel !). So I think there are definitely DMA 
problems with nforce2 boards under linux.

Sam

Vitez Gabor wrote:

>If turning off APIC doesn't solve the problem, try a kernel with 
>LOCAL APIC support turned off. 
>
>
>	Gabor
>  
>

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Samuel Kvasnica]

Dear Gabor,

thantks a lot, indeed you are right ! I've been confused by some nforce 
FAQs where 'nolapic' option was recommended. In fact I did never check 
whether this option
really exists. Now, after recompiling the kernel the framegrabber works 
with uncompressed stream for almost 24h and it is rock-solid.

So, a workaround recommendation for all using ivtv driver on nforce2 
chipsets and kernels up to 2.4.22:

*** RECOMPILE YOUR KERNEL WITH LOCAL APIC DISABLED ***,

otherwise you'll experience very rare random lockups while watching the 
compressed stream and lockups within 10 minutes when watching the 
uncompressed
yuv stream.

What I'd like to know is whether this bug is AMD processor or chipset 
related. Is there a patch available ? I tried 2.6.0-test8 and it wasn't 
stable. I'd prefer to use APIC instead of XT-PIC because some drivers 
e.g. kernel DRM don't support shared interrupts and I can't get own 
interrupt for the video card.

Sam


Vitez Gabor wrote:

>Hi,
>
>On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 03:22:04PM +0200, Samuel Kvasnica wrote:
>  
>
>>I'm booting the kernel with acpi=off, noapic and nolapic options and 
>>    
>>
>
>nolapic? That's not a valid kernel command line parameter I'm afraid. 
>
>fgrep -ri nolapic $KERNEL_SOURCE_DIR
>
>gives nothing. ???
>
>
>	Gabor
>  
>

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Mikael Pettersson]

Samuel Kvasnica writes:
 > Dear Gabor,
 > 
 > thantks a lot, indeed you are right ! I've been confused by some nforce 
 > FAQs where 'nolapic' option was recommended. In fact I did never check 
 > whether this option
 > really exists. Now, after recompiling the kernel the framegrabber works 
 > with uncompressed stream for almost 24h and it is rock-solid.
 > 
 > So, a workaround recommendation for all using ivtv driver on nforce2 
 > chipsets and kernels up to 2.4.22:
 > 
 > *** RECOMPILE YOUR KERNEL WITH LOCAL APIC DISABLED ***,
 > 
 > otherwise you'll experience very rare random lockups while watching the 
 > compressed stream and lockups within 10 minutes when watching the 
 > uncompressed
 > yuv stream.
 > 
 > What I'd like to know is whether this bug is AMD processor or chipset 
 > related.

Chipset and/or BIOS. AMD processors are known to work in other mobos.

You may try disabling just I/O-APIC or ACPI.

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Samuel Kvasnica]

> > 
> > What I'd like to know is whether this bug is AMD processor or chipset 
> > related.
>
>Chipset and/or BIOS. AMD processors are known to work in other mobos.
>
>You may try disabling just I/O-APIC or ACPI.
>  
>
No, only disabling local apic really helps. On both ASUS and MSI nforce2 
motherboards. I can even enable apic and acpi with disabled local apic 
(anyway with XT-PIC only) and have no troubles. The lockups seem to 
appear when drivers heavily employing DMA are used (as udma5 hdd or 
framegrabber).

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Samuel Kvasnica wrote:
> Dear Gabor,
> 
> thantks a lot, indeed you are right ! I've been confused by some nforce 
> FAQs where 'nolapic' option was recommended. In fact I did never check 
> whether this option
> really exists. Now, after recompiling the kernel the framegrabber works 
> with uncompressed stream for almost 24h and it is rock-solid.
> 
> So, a workaround recommendation for all using ivtv driver on nforce2 
> chipsets and kernels up to 2.4.22:
> 
> *** RECOMPILE YOUR KERNEL WITH LOCAL APIC DISABLED ***,
> 
> otherwise you'll experience very rare random lockups while watching the 
> compressed stream and lockups within 10 minutes when watching the 
> uncompressed
> yuv stream.
> 
> What I'd like to know is whether this bug is AMD processor or chipset 
> related. Is there a patch available ? I tried 2.6.0-test8 and it wasn't 
> stable. I'd prefer to use APIC instead of XT-PIC because some drivers 
> e.g. kernel DRM don't support shared interrupts and I can't get own 
> interrupt for the video card.
> 
> Sam
> 
> 
> Vitez Gabor wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 03:22:04PM +0200, Samuel Kvasnica wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> I'm booting the kernel with acpi=off, noapic and nolapic options and   
>>
>>
>> nolapic? That's not a valid kernel command line parameter I'm afraid.
>> fgrep -ri nolapic $KERNEL_SOURCE_DIR
>>
>> gives nothing. ???
>>
>>
>>     Gabor
>>  

Extract fron linux-2.6test8 Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
nolapic   [IA-32,APIC] Do not enable or use the local APIC.

So, It is supported in the kernel 2.6.x

Cheers
James

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Denis]

On Tuesday 21 October 2003 20:01, Samuel Kvasnica wrote:
> Now, in the system with MSI K7N2 motherboard I have a framegrabber
> (Hauppauge PVR-250) installed, using ivtv driver.
> I'm able to lock-up the system when streaming uncompressed video
> (e.g. cat /dev/yuv0 >/dev/null) and the lockups are also hard, w/o
> debug info. The ivtv driver is using DMA very heavily  but seems to
> work on other chipsets. So these lock-up problems might be rather DMA
> then APIC related. Interesting is that I've never had such a lock-up
> when running WinXP on same computer ( :-) seems impossible), even
> under load and with the framegrabber.

It can be a too-aggressive chipset configuration triggering chipset big.

Maybe do lspci -vvvxxx and it's WinXP equivalent (I think such tool
for Win ought to exist somewhere, although I had no need for it yet)
and compare the result.
--
vda

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Samuel Kvasnica]

>>Now, in the system with MSI K7N2 motherboard I have a framegrabber
>>(Hauppauge PVR-250) installed, using ivtv driver.
>>I'm able to lock-up the system when streaming uncompressed video
>>(e.g. cat /dev/yuv0 >/dev/null) and the lockups are also hard, w/o
>>debug info. The ivtv driver is using DMA very heavily  but seems to
>>work on other chipsets. So these lock-up problems might be rather DMA
>>then APIC related. Interesting is that I've never had such a lock-up
>>when running WinXP on same computer ( :-) seems impossible), even
>>under load and with the framegrabber.
>>    
>>
>
>It can be a too-aggressive chipset configuration triggering chipset big.
>
>Maybe do lspci -vvvxxx and it's WinXP equivalent (I think such tool
>for Win ought to exist somewhere, although I had no need for it yet)
>and compare the result.
>--
>vda
>

It was local APIC ! After recompiling 2.4.22 without local apic 
everything works smoothly since several  weeks. I wonder when there'll 
be a kernel
patch that really solves these nforce2/amd issues.
Sam

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Eric Sandall]

Quoting Samuel Kvasnica <samuel.kvasnica@tuwien.ac.at>:
> It was local APIC ! After recompiling 2.4.22 without local apic 
> everything works smoothly since several  weeks. I wonder when there'll 
> be a kernel
> patch that really solves these nforce2/amd issues.
> Sam

Disabling local APIC on 2.6.0-test9-mm2 also fixes this (I haven't tried on
earlier kernels).

-sandalle

-- 
PGP Key Fingerprint:  FCFF 26A1 BE21 08F4 BB91  FAED 1D7B 7D74 A8EF DD61
http://search.keyserver.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xA8EFDD61

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS/E/IT$ d-- s++:+>: a-- C++(+++) BL++++VIS>$ P+(++) L+++ E-(---) W++ N+@ o?
K? w++++>-- O M-@ V-- PS+(+++) PE(-) Y++(+) PGP++(+) t+() 5++ X(+) R+(++)
tv(--)b++(+++) DI+@ D++(+++) G>+++ e>+++ h---(++) r++ y+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric@sandall.us                  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/  #196285  |  http://www.shock.wsu.edu/

----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

Re: nforce2 random lockups - still no solution ?

[Josh McKinney]

On approximately Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 11:40:06AM -0800, Eric Sandall wrote:
> Quoting Samuel Kvasnica <samuel.kvasnica@tuwien.ac.at>:
> > It was local APIC ! After recompiling 2.4.22 without local apic 
> > everything works smoothly since several  weeks. I wonder when there'll 
> > be a kernel
> > patch that really solves these nforce2/amd issues.
> > Sam
> 
> Disabling local APIC on 2.6.0-test9-mm2 also fixes this (I haven't tried on
> earlier kernels).
> 
> -sandalle
> 

I am seeing the same thing here.  Disk activity and APIC don't seem to
do well.  What kind of performance hit if any are we taking by disabling
APIC?

-- 
Josh McKinney		     |	Webmaster: http://joshandangie.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
                             | They that can give up essential liberty
Linux, the choice       -o)  | to obtain a little temporary safety deserve 
of the GNU generation    /\  | neither liberty or safety. 
                        _\_v |                          -Benjamin Franklin