Re: Via KT600 support?

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Cory Bell]

Joe Harrington <jh@oobleck.astro.cornell.edu> wrote:
> I am having show-stopper difficulties getting Linux to run on my Asus
> A7V600 motherboard, which sports the Via KT600 chipset.

I also have an Asus A7V600. I'm unsure of the board revision, but I'm
running BIOS 1005.
 
> During install of Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core test3, Red Hat 9, and
> Debian 3.0r1, the install fails at a random point, generally during
> the non-interactive package loading phase.  The most recent kernel
> with the problem is kernel-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl in the Fedora Core 1
> release.  The problem is 100% reproducible.

I installed FC1 from CD with no problems.

> VC messages indicate problems in different programs each time.
> Generally the failure happens during package installation, but
> sometimes it happens earlier.  After the first indication of a
> problem, one can generally still switch VCs, but eventually that stops
> working, too.  Frequently, there are several programs indicating
> problems in the VC screens.

What are you seeing? Segfaults? Panics? Have you tried the memtest86
boot option (from the FC1 CDs)?

> The hardware:
> 
> Asus A7V600 mobo (VIA KT600 chipset)
> AMD 2800+XP CPU
> 1536 MB DDR333 (3 sticks)
> IDE disks (250GB WD)
> IDE CD/DVD reader

I have:
Asus A7V600
Athlon XP 2600+ (Barton)
512MB DDR333 (PC2700)
Lite-On IDE DVD-ROM
Lite-On IDE CD-RW
Maxtor PATA 160GB
Chaintech Geforce 4 Ti4800 (AGP 8x)
No SATA

> Things I have tried:
> noapic nolapic acpi=off pci=noacpi allowcddma nodma
> in various combinations and individually.  None worked.  I also
> changed "APIC" to "PIC" in the BIOS, to no avail.

Mine works fine in APIC mode and with ACPI.
 
> I have tested and replaced the hardware extensively over the past
> several months of chasing this problem down.  The problem is not
> damaged hardware.  I suspect it is a problem with chipset support in
> the kernel.  However, I have not been able to find a reliable source
> of information about the support status of various chipsets and
> motherboard features in the kernel.

Everything is supported fine except:
1) The OSS driver doesn't like the onboard AC-97 Audio - I installed
ALSA 0.9.8 with "options snd-via82xx dxs_support=2".
2) The sk98lin driver included in 2.4.22 is very old and doesn't
support the onboard "3Com 3C940" (actually a Syskonnect chip).
2.4.23-rc1 contains the latest driver, or you can patch 2.4.22.

ALSA: http://www.alsa-project.org/
Syskonnect Driver: http://www.syskonnect.com/syskonnect/support/driver/d0102_driver.html

One caveat: It appears that the kernel included with FC1 was not
compiled with the same version of gcc that is included in FC1. This
means you will need to compile your own kernel (or rebuild the FC1
kernel SRPM). I got an instant panic when trying to insert a
locally-compiled sk98lin module into the supplied kernel, so I just
downloaded the latest 2.4.23 test release.

-Cory

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Joe Harrington]

> I also have an Asus A7V600. I'm unsure of the board revision, but I'm
> running BIOS 1005.
 
I am glad to see a positive report with this botherboard (actually,
that was a typo but it's perfectly true, so I'll leave it).  The
problem has turned out to be faulty memory, so I apologize to the list
for wasting your time.  So nobody complains, I used 4 different sticks
of SimpleTech memory in this machine, all with the same results.  They
passed 24 hours of memtest86 with no errors.  But, replacing them with
some Corsair memory fixed the problem.  A Simpletech rep says the
batch that my 4 sticks come from was not a particularly bad batch, but
they are sending boards from another batch that they use in more
applications in hope that it fixes the problem.  They also say this
chipset is particularly finicky about memory.  Needless to say, I
won't be sending them any more of my hard-earned cash: If it says
PC2700 on it, it should perform that way.  This was not "value RAM" to
me.

In case anyone else has similar trouble, I'll answer some of your
questions so it's easier to identify:

> > VC messages indicate problems in different programs each time.
> > Generally the failure happens during package installation, but
> > sometimes it happens earlier.  After the first indication of a
> > problem, one can generally still switch VCs, but eventually that stops
> > working, too.  Frequently, there are several programs indicating
> > problems in the VC screens.

> What are you seeing? Segfaults? Panics? Have you tried the memtest86
> boot option (from the FC1 CDs)?

I ran memtest86 for a day with no errors.  Is there something that can
be done to make its tests more definitive?  Clearly this tool didn't
find the problem, but a few minutes of transferring files did.

VC4 gave messages including:
EIP is at (some process or kernel routine name, different each time)
then a stack and call trace (again, different each time)
then sometimes
Kernel panic: 
also sometimes
Kernel BUG in buffer.c:
sometimes there are several sets of data including the EIP message,
stack trace, etc. for different programs/kernel routines at once.

Sometimes the installer just quits, saying it exited abnormally, and
it does a graceful shutdown without any VC4 errors.

The clues in your report will help a lot now that I have this thing
working.  I wish there were a website for such info, like there is for
laptops.

Thanks again for your report.

--jh--

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Stefan Smietanowski]

> One caveat: It appears that the kernel included with FC1 was not
> compiled with the same version of gcc that is included in FC1. This
> means you will need to compile your own kernel (or rebuild the FC1
> kernel SRPM). I got an instant panic when trying to insert a
> locally-compiled sk98lin module into the supplied kernel, so I just
> downloaded the latest 2.4.23 test release.

Install the gcc32 rpm and compile the kernel with CC=gcc32 instead.

// Stefan

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Stefan Smietanowski]

Stefan Smietanowski wrote:

> 
>> One caveat: It appears that the kernel included with FC1 was not
>> compiled with the same version of gcc that is included in FC1. This
>> means you will need to compile your own kernel (or rebuild the FC1
>> kernel SRPM). I got an instant panic when trying to insert a
>> locally-compiled sk98lin module into the supplied kernel, so I just
>> downloaded the latest 2.4.23 test release.
> 
> 
> Install the gcc32 rpm and compile the kernel with CC=gcc32 instead.
> 
> // Stefan

That is, compile the driver you want compiled that way.

// Stefan

Via KT600 support?

[Joe Harrington]

I am having show-stopper difficulties getting Linux to run on my Asus
A7V600 motherboard, which sports the Via KT600 chipset.

During install of Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core test3, Red Hat 9, and
Debian 3.0r1, the install fails at a random point, generally during
the non-interactive package loading phase.  The most recent kernel
with the problem is kernel-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl in the Fedora Core 1
release.  The problem is 100% reproducible.

VC messages indicate problems in different programs each time.
Generally the failure happens during package installation, but
sometimes it happens earlier.  After the first indication of a
problem, one can generally still switch VCs, but eventually that stops
working, too.  Frequently, there are several programs indicating
problems in the VC screens.

In three months of trials, I have never gotten any install to run to
completion on this machine.  I have used the same media for each of
the distros above to install other machines.

The hardware:

Asus A7V600 mobo (VIA KT600 chipset)
AMD 2800+XP CPU
1536 MB DDR333 (3 sticks)
IDE disks (250GB WD)
IDE CD/DVD reader

On Morphix 0.4-1 (a live-CD linux distro), this configuration boots,
but crashes during large file copies (1GB or larger generally does it,
but it can happen much sooner than that, or occasionally take longer).

Things I have tried:
noapic nolapic acpi=off pci=noacpi allowcddma nodma
in various combinations and individually.  None worked.  I also
changed "APIC" to "PIC" in the BIOS, to no avail.

I have tested and replaced the hardware extensively over the past
several months of chasing this problem down.  The problem is not
damaged hardware.  I suspect it is a problem with chipset support in
the kernel.  However, I have not been able to find a reliable source
of information about the support status of various chipsets and
motherboard features in the kernel.

Please reply directly as I am not subscribed to linux-kernel.

Thanks,

--jh--

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Maciej Soltysiak]

> During install of Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core test3, Red Hat 9, and
> Debian 3.0r1, the install fails at a random point, generally during
> the non-interactive package loading phase.  The most recent kernel
> with the problem is kernel-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl in the Fedora Core 1
> release.  The problem is 100% reproducible.
Hmm, I have installed Mandrake 9.1 on some Gigabyte KT600 motherboard
with no problems. It had 2.4.21 kernel.

Maybe you should check if there's a BIOS update for that MB?

Regards,
Maciej

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Joe Harrington]

> > During install of Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core test3, Red Hat 9, and
> > Debian 3.0r1, the install fails at a random point, generally during
> > the non-interactive package loading phase.  The most recent kernel
> > with the problem is kernel-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl in the Fedora Core 1
> > release.  The problem is 100% reproducible.

> Hmm, I have installed Mandrake 9.1 on some Gigabyte KT600 motherboard
> with no problems. It had 2.4.21 kernel.

> Maybe you should check if there's a BIOS update for that MB?

Yes, thanks, I did that before I posted.  The problem exists with both
the original BIOS (1004) and the latest (1005).

Is anyone aware of similar problems with other manufacturers' KT600
boards that were fixed in recent BIOS updates?  Perhaps Asus has a
BIOS bug they haven't fixed yet.

By the way, I also underclocked both the CPU and the memory as far
down as they would go, just to check, and the problem persisted.

--jh--

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Ruth Ivimey-Cook]

Joe Harrington wrote:

>Yes, thanks, I did that before I posted.  The problem exists with both
>the original BIOS (1004) and the latest (1005).
>
>Is anyone aware of similar problems with other manufacturers' KT600
>boards that were fixed in recent BIOS updates?  Perhaps Asus has a
>BIOS bug they haven't fixed yet.
>
>By the way, I also underclocked both the CPU and the memory as far
>down as they would go, just to check, and the problem persisted.
>  
>
I have an A7V600 too, with a Athlon 2100+. I found that the 2.4 kernel 
support (2.4.20 ... 22) was not up to it also, and switched to try the 
2.6.0-t9 kernel; this has, so far, proved fairly stable, with the 
exception of a might_sleep problem on the plug-in PCI IEEE1394 card I have.

I noticed that, with 2.4, the kernel was treating the KT600 chipset as a 
KT400 chipset: I don't know if this has changed in later editions of 
2.4, but it seemed to be an undesireable thing to do, which partly 
prompted my shift to 2.6

I too tried updating the BIOS to 1005; it does seem to fix a power-up 
problem (originally the BIOS would sometimes claim that a hardware fault 
had happened which hadn't hapened) but there still seem to be issues 
with the SATA ports: drives on them are never listed in the BIOS boot 
sequence, and unless I do a cold-boot (i.e. cable-unplugged, not just 
'off') the SATA drives aren't visible at all to the BIOS or to Linux.

One of these days I'll get around to filing a bug report about the SATA 
stuff with ASUS. Should it make a difference, the drives I@m using are 
Seagate 7200.7 120GB/8MB.

Regards,

Ruth

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Stefan Smietanowski]

Joe Harrington wrote:

>>>During install of Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core test3, Red Hat 9, and
>>>Debian 3.0r1, the install fails at a random point, generally during
>>>the non-interactive package loading phase.  The most recent kernel
>>>with the problem is kernel-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl in the Fedora Core 1
>>>release.  The problem is 100% reproducible.
> 
> 
>>Hmm, I have installed Mandrake 9.1 on some Gigabyte KT600 motherboard
>>with no problems. It had 2.4.21 kernel.
> 
> 
>>Maybe you should check if there's a BIOS update for that MB?
> 
> 
> Yes, thanks, I did that before I posted.  The problem exists with both
> the original BIOS (1004) and the latest (1005).
> 
> Is anyone aware of similar problems with other manufacturers' KT600
> boards that were fixed in recent BIOS updates?  Perhaps Asus has a
> BIOS bug they haven't fixed yet.
> 
> By the way, I also underclocked both the CPU and the memory as far
> down as they would go, just to check, and the problem persisted.

Have you tried running with only one stick of memory ?

I have a Soyo KT600 board and it runs perfectly with one 512MiB PC3200
DIMM.

// Stefan

Re: Via KT600 support?

[Kristian Lyngstøl]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 10:09:17AM -0500, Joe Harrington wrote:
> Is anyone aware of similar problems with other manufacturers' KT600
> boards that were fixed in recent BIOS updates?  Perhaps Asus has a
> BIOS bug they haven't fixed yet.

I am thinking this is a faulty motherboard, but since we're on the subject
I'll check witht he list anyway...
I've got a Asus A7V600 with XP2500+, 512GB pc2700 ram.
The thing works fine, with a few "minor" exceptions. Firstly, the 
gigabit nic seems to fail utterly. I can configure it but get som 
error-messages I've never seen anyware before. Have anyone had problems
with the integrated nic?

Also, the SATA drive seem to work when I boot, but fail after a while.
I am quite sure the drive is OK, since I used it on a Abit KD7-g
without problems. (That motherboard also happened to die...).
The symptoms are that the disk works fine for anything between an hour
and a day, but suddenly start spilling out DMA-errors and the like,
then shuts down completly. 

The weird thing about all this is that everything EXCEPT Sata and 
the built in NIC seem to work without any problems.

Have anyone seen anything even close to this or should I just send this
motherboard back to the store ?

-- 
Med vennlig hilsen
Kristian Lyngstøl