Re: ServerWorks LE and MTRR

Steffen Persvold
2001-04-29T20:59:17Z

Gérard Roudier wrote:
>
> On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Steffen Persvold wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I just compiled 2.4.4 and are running it on a Serverworks LE motherboard.
> > Whenever I try to add a write-combining region, it gets rejected. I took a peek
> > in the arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c and found that this is just as expected with
> > v1.40 of the code. It is great that the mtrr code checks and prevents the user
> > from doing something that could eventually lead to data corruption. Using
> > write-combining on PCI acesses can lead to this on certain LE revisions but
> > _not_ all (only rev < 5). Therefore please consider my small patch to allow the
> > good ones to be able to use write-combining. I have several rev 06 and they are
> > working fine with this patch.
>
> You wrote that 'only rev < 5' can lead to data corruption, but your patch
> seems to disallow use of write combining for rev 5 too.
>
> Could you clarify?

Oops just a typo, it should be <= 5. The patch is correct.

>
> Gérard.
>
> PS:
> >From what hat did you get this information ? as it seems that ServerWorks
> require NDA for letting know technical information on their chipsets.
>

I've learned it the hard way, I have two types : Compaq DL360 (rev 5) and a
Tyan S2510 (rev 6). On the compaq machine I constantly get data corruption on
the last double word (4 bytes) in a 64 byte PCI burst when I use write
combining on the CPU. On the Tyan however the transfer is always ok.

--
Steffen Persvold Systems Engineer
Email : mailto:sp@scali.com Scali AS (http://www.scali.com)
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