IDE UDMA/ATA Suckage, or something else?

IDE UDMA/ATA Suckage, or something else?

[Paul G. Allen]

I have had numerous problems with several different motherboards, and so
have some colleagues of mine. The motherboards are Asus A7V133 (newer
and older revisions), Tyan K7 Thunder, and Asus A7M266. They all have
NVidia AGP video cards and they vary from Duron 750MHz to Athlon
Thunderbird 1.4GHz, to Athlon MP 1.2GHz CPUs. Chipsets are VIA, AMD760,
AMD761, and AMD760MP.

In every case they all exhibit frequent lockups, often to the point that
remote connections fail requiring a reset, while running intense 3D
software, and occasional lockups when running intensive X applications.
Note that not all these systems have been using the NVidia 1.0-1251 3D
driver - at times they were just using the nv driver provided by XFree86
- and they have been run in multiple AGP configurations from 1x - 4x, FW
on and off, and in PCI only mode.

Currently, I am running a 2.4.7-ac10 SMP debug kernel on my K7 Thunder
and I was hoping things would be better, and if not then at least I
could see something in the logs if it did crash/lock. I also compiled
NVidia driver with debugging enabled. Things are no better as the system
still locks up frequently while playing Quake 3, and I can't even start
Unreal Tournament without it locking and requiring a reset (SysRq,
logging in remotely, etc. does not work). The logs tell me nothing.

What I have found is that if I disable DMA on my IBM ATA100 drive, the
system is quite stable (though it is slow as snot - running at a
ridiculous 4.5MB/sec. as compared to 35MB/sec. with UDMA33/66 enabled).
These systems also seem fine when running with Ultra160 drives and no
IDE at all (SCSI CDROM, as well as hard drives). Not only is the K7
Thunder system stable, but I can even actually play Unreal Tournament.
Other applications that previously locked the systems work fine as well.

Comments?

PGA

-- 
Paul G. Allen
UNIX Admin II/Network Security
Akamai Technologies, Inc.
www.akamai.com

Re: IDE UDMA/ATA Suckage, or something else?

[Alan Cox]

> Currently, I am running a 2.4.7-ac10 SMP debug kernel on my K7 Thunder
> and I was hoping things would be better, and if not then at least I
> could see something in the logs if it did crash/lock. I also compiled
> NVidia driver with debugging enabled. Things are no better as the system
> still locks up frequently while playing Quake 3, and I can't even start
> Unreal Tournament without it locking and requiring a reset (SysRq,
> logging in remotely, etc. does not work). The logs tell me nothing.

Once you've touched the 3D stuff I dont actually care about bug reports that
boot even after 3d unloaded. I'm simply sick of fielding Nvidia's bug
reports.

> What I have found is that if I disable DMA on my IBM ATA100 drive, the
> system is quite stable (though it is slow as snot - running at a
> ridiculous 4.5MB/sec. as compared to 35MB/sec. with UDMA33/66 enabled).

You must disable IDE prefetch on the current versions of the AMD MP 
chipset, you may also need to enable "noapic". 

Re: IDE UDMA/ATA Suckage, or something else?

[Paul G. Allen]

Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > Currently, I am running a 2.4.7-ac10 SMP debug kernel on my K7 Thunder
> > and I was hoping things would be better, and if not then at least I
> > could see something in the logs if it did crash/lock. I also compiled
> > NVidia driver with debugging enabled. Things are no better as the system
> > still locks up frequently while playing Quake 3, and I can't even start
> > Unreal Tournament without it locking and requiring a reset (SysRq,
> > logging in remotely, etc. does not work). The logs tell me nothing.
> 
> Once you've touched the 3D stuff I dont actually care about bug reports that
> boot even after 3d unloaded. I'm simply sick of fielding Nvidia's bug
> reports.
> 
> > What I have found is that if I disable DMA on my IBM ATA100 drive, the
> > system is quite stable (though it is slow as snot - running at a
> > ridiculous 4.5MB/sec. as compared to 35MB/sec. with UDMA33/66 enabled).
> 
> You must disable IDE prefetch on the current versions of the AMD MP
> chipset, you may also need to enable "noapic".

Unless I can do it with the kernel, I have no choice. The BIOS has no
prefetch setting (which, BTW, I had disabled on all my A7V133 boards).
So what about problems with non MP boards?

PGA

-- 
Paul G. Allen
UNIX Admin II/Network Security
Akamai Technologies, Inc.
www.akamai.com

Re: IDE UDMA/ATA Suckage, or something else?

[Alan Cox]

> > You must disable IDE prefetch on the current versions of the AMD MP
> > chipset, you may also need to enable "noapic".
> 
> Unless I can do it with the kernel, I have no choice. The BIOS has no
> prefetch setting (which, BTW, I had disabled on all my A7V133 boards).
> So what about problems with non MP boards?

Well its entirely possible that the BIOS vendor did the right thing and
made sure you couldnt turn it on. How does your box behave with noapic ?

Re: IDE UDMA/ATA Suckage, or something else?

[Paul G. Allen]

Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > > You must disable IDE prefetch on the current versions of the AMD MP
> > > chipset, you may also need to enable "noapic".
> >
> > Unless I can do it with the kernel, I have no choice. The BIOS has no
> > prefetch setting (which, BTW, I had disabled on all my A7V133 boards).
> > So what about problems with non MP boards?
> 
> Well its entirely possible that the BIOS vendor did the right thing and
> made sure you couldnt turn it on. How does your box behave with noapic ?

I haven't had a chance to try it yet. I'll let the lists know when I do.

PGA

-- 
Paul G. Allen
UNIX Admin II/Programmer
Akamai Technologies, Inc.
www.akamai.com
Work: (858)909-3630
Cell: (858)395-5043