Re: A7N8X (Deluxe) Madness

[Josh McKinney <forming@charter.net>]

I thought I would share some of my experiences with the ASUS A7N8X.  I
just got this mobo last week, so I haven't had a whole lot of time with
it nor do I have anything on the SATA controller.  2.6.0-test9-mm2 would
crash hard with any IDE activity with APIC and IO-APIC enabled.
recompiling the kernel without APIC or IO-APIC but with APCI still
enabled and and *no* pci=noacpi on the command line the board is
perfectly stable and I see no performance hit with the IDE disks.  Here
is my /proc/interrupts with the working config:

$ cat /proc/interrupts 
           CPU0       
  0:   90624732          XT-PIC  timer
  1:      21404          XT-PIC  i8042
  2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
  5:      35712          XT-PIC  ohci_hcd
  8:          1          XT-PIC  rtc
  9:          0          XT-PIC  acpi
 11:    6930402          XT-PIC  nvidia
 12:     114340          XT-PIC  ehci_hcd, ohci_hcd, eth0, NVidia
           nForce2
 14:        887          XT-PIC  ide0
 15:     133930          XT-PIC  ide1
NMI:          0 
ERR:          0
 
If there is anything else I could test or anymore info I could give to
help track down this problem I would be more than happy to help.  I am
planning on buying some SATA drives soon and might change my mind if
this issue isn't cleared up.

Thanks
 
On approximately Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 08:47:38PM +0100, Julien Oster wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> seriously, I'm pretty fed up with it.
> 
> I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe mainboard. Yeah, right, that thing causing
> serious trouble. I'm getting hard lockups all the time. No panic, no
> message, no sysrq, no blinking cursor in the framebuffer. Gone for good.
> 
> I went through the mailing list archive and tried out many
> things. However, this is how far I got:
> 
> With 2.6.0-test9, the machine locks up while booting or shortly
> after. This is clearly connected to high IDE (PATA) load, since it
> locks up with a 100% chance while doing an fsck. If I managed booting
> it (which means, if it doesn't do an fsck while booting) I can lock it
> up immediately by doing a hdparm -t /dev/hda. I don't know what SATA
> load would do on that kernel, I never got that far.
> 
> Specifying "noapic nolapic acpi=off noacpi=off" helps, I got no
> lockups. However, I don't like this, because of the performance flaws
> (I'll talk about this later).
> 
> So, one might suspect: Something between APIC or ACPI (or both) and
> the IDE controller broken, nothing to fix there, that's life. Right?
> Wrong. Because:
> 
> With 2.4.22-ac4 it actually works *better*. Not absolutely good, but
> better. I can achieve uptimes up to *several days*. However, it still
> locks up. Sometimes after several days, sometimes some minutes after
> booting. But basically I can actually use my computer with
> 2.4.22-ac4. Strangely, the lockups don't seem to be connected to IDE
> load with that kernel. When the machine locks up, it simply does,
> without any appearent cause. I can create as many CPU, disk, network
> or whatever load I want. All goes fine. Then I leave the computer, the
> machine staying idle, I come back and it's crashed. I even have the
> impression, that it only crashes when it has no load at all. Clearly
> spoken, I can't really remember that it locked up when I was sitting
> in front of the computer. Moving the mouse or typing things seems to
> create enough load to actually keep it from locking up?!
> 
> So, things are totally different between 2.6.0-test9 and
> 2.4.22-ac4. 2.6.0-test9 doesn't like the slightest IDE load with that
> mainboard at all. 2.4.22-ac4 doesn't care, runs for hours or for days
> and then locks up when it just gets bored or something similar.
> 
> The solution might look simple: why don't I just use 2.6.0-test9 with
> the enormous "noapic nolapic acpi=off pci=noacpi" command line?
> Because then, my SATA performance really is a pain compared to what I
> can get with 2.4.22-ac4. A simple example with hdparm -t (I tried
> other things, also, but this already gives a nice example): with
> 2.4.22-ac4 I get amazing 100 to 110 MB/s on the SATA RAID. With
> 2.6.0-test9 and the nasty command line, I get at most 40MB/s. To feel
> the difference, I just have to fire up Oracle and let it do some I/O
> expensive things.
> 
> Has nobody an idea what it could be? That's just strange, both kernels
> are unstable on that mainboard, but the one is much more stable while
> locking up in completely different situations.
> 
> If that continues like that, I'll begin to feel the urge of hunting
> ASUS and NVIDIA down.
> 
> Well, I hope I could give you some worthy information.
> 
> In great despair,
> Julien
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Josh McKinney		     |	Webmaster: http://joshandangie.org
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