Re: ASUS M2NPV-VM APIC/ACPI Bug (patched)

[Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>]

On Wednesday 18 October 2006 02:44, Daniel Mierswa wrote:
> Some people have deeper problems with the Asus M2NPV-VM mainboard
> (rather the chipset of the mainboard).
> A google for "Asus M2NPV-VM apic" shows that. I'm one of them,
> desperately searching a way to fix that, using that board with an AMD
> Athlon64 X2 3800+ Dual Core Processor.
> It wouldn't boot because of APIC and ACPI errors. There were "kind of"
> workarounds by passing acpi=off/noirq and noapic to the kernel which
> resulted in sometimes bad internal clock. I for myself had the same
> problem and due to the error with my internal system clock all
> applications and drivers gone mad, including
> sound,video,graphics,usb,etc.. I googled around and saw the following:
> http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/8/13/25
> Actually that was a patch created for the 2.6.18-rc4 kernel. I tried
> several kernels all with the same results. Some of them are
> 2.6.18-mm3, 2.6.19-rc2, 2.6.17, 2.6.18, 2.6.18.1, some gentoo patched
> sources and what not. All will hang after the io scheduler gets loaded,
> passing acpi=off/noirq to the kernel will workaround that one. Then it
> will boot on and finally reach the ochi_hcd driver which will not load
> because of shared IRQ problems, passing nousb to the kernel will
> workaround that. It will boot more and come to the dhcp client, where it
> fails because of an Interrupt error.
> Some people passing noapic acpi=off/noirq to the kernel got later sound
> problems, they fixed that by passing "snd-hda-intel model=3stack
> position_fix=1" which worked around that interrupt problem. So with the
> patch provided on http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/8/13/25 it all works out.
> The internal system clock works just fine, the drivers load
>  all fine, no need to patch the sound,graphics or anything at all. No
> need for kernel parameters either. Here's the patch again, created by
> diff -ur on the current 2.6.18.1 kernel:
> 
> --- io_apic.c.orig	2006-10-18 08:02:50.000000000 +0200
> +++ io_apic.c	2006-10-18 07:40:48.000000000 +0200
> @@ -337,12 +337,12 @@
>  					nvidia_hpet_detected = 0;
>  					acpi_table_parse(ACPI_HPET,
>  							nvidia_hpet_check);
> -					if (nvidia_hpet_detected == 0) {
> +/*					if (nvidia_hpet_detected == 0) {
>  						acpi_skip_timer_override = 1;
>  						printk(KERN_INFO "Nvidia board "
>  						    "detected. Ignoring ACPI "
>  						    "timer override.\n");
> -					}
> +					}*/
>  #endif

I recall quite clearly that Nvidia told us that that acpi_skip_timer_override
was necessary in NFORCE2 days.  I don't remember the HPET qualification to
that statement -- I guess that came later.
Unfortunately, my NFORCE2 board is dead, so I can't really test this out directly.

Perhaps checking for PCI_VENDOR_ID_NVIDIA is too broad and the workaround
is counter-productive on their newer NVIDIA chip-sets?

-Len

ps.
One (other) problem with this code is that it checks for an HPET table,
but doesn't check that the kernel has HPET support enabled.