Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

[Robert M. Stockmann]

Hello,

To my dismay when arriving home i came to the conclusion that Tyan has 
switched off the parallel port by _default_ inside several BIOS releases 
in quite a number of her Opteron based motherboards.

This happens to be also the case with my Tyan Thunder K8W motherboard.

It also seems to a rather important issue when running a Linux 
distribution based on kernel 2.6.x on such a Tyan Opteron board.

Tyan switching off the Parallel Port is even also reported at the public
forum at amd.com :

http://forums.amd.com/lofiversion/index.php/t43260.html

Recently however when updating to the newest BIOS release for Tyan 
Opteron boards the parallel port seems to be switched on again inside 
the factory default settings. Exactly as we have seen with your Tyan 
Tomcat single Opteron CPU board.

The fact however that _all_ the various Linux distributions I have 
tested so far, both 32bit and 64bit AMD64, seem to have severe problems 
with the parallel port implementation of Tyan Opteron based boards, is 
so far _nowhere_ mentioned.

All problems of Tyan Opteron based machines silently locking up during 
installation and/or during normal operation of running Linux, both 
32bit and 64bit, without any display of kernel panic of any other 
logging method, seem to be solved when switching off the Parallel Port 
inside its BIOS.

So here my official complaint to Tyan and the Linux kernel developers 
to either make public notice of these problems, or preferably create a 
solution/workaround for this problem either in software or hardware or 
maybe inside a BIOS update.

Regards,

Robert M. Stockmann
-- 
Robert M. Stockmann - RHCE
Network Engineer - UNIX/Linux Specialist
crashrecovery.org  stock@stokkie.net

Re: Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, 20 May 2005, Robert M. Stockmann wrote:
> 
> All problems of Tyan Opteron based machines silently locking up during 
> installation and/or during normal operation of running Linux, both 
> 32bit and 64bit, without any display of kernel panic of any other 
> logging method, seem to be solved when switching off the Parallel Port 
> inside its BIOS.

Can you do an install with the thing turned off, and then 
 - compile the kernel with CONFIG_PCI_DEBUG
 - boot with the parallel port enabled, and send as much of the bootup 
   output (and /proc/iomem and /proc/ioport) as possible
 - boot with the parallel port disabled, and send the same output for that 
   working case.

I have no clue why the parallel port should matter, but it could change 
some resource allocation issues.

		Linus

Re: Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

[Andi Kleen]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

> On Fri, 20 May 2005, Robert M. Stockmann wrote:
>> 
>> All problems of Tyan Opteron based machines silently locking up during 
>> installation and/or during normal operation of running Linux, both 
>> 32bit and 64bit, without any display of kernel panic of any other 
>> logging method, seem to be solved when switching off the Parallel Port 
>> inside its BIOS.

The common Tyan problem case is when the machine has more than 3GB
of RAM and "memory remapping" is enabled to recover the memory
below the PCI memory hole. SOmething in that setup leads
to problems and random memory corruption. I suspect a BIOS bug
here.

Workaround is to not enable that option in the BIOS setup.

Then another older Tyan board (it might have been the K8W)
was *extremly* picky in what DIMMs it accepted and in what 
slots because someone apparently didnt follow the AMD specification for 
the memory controller trace lines fully. That also caused common problems. 


> Can you do an install with the thing turned off, and then 
>  - compile the kernel with CONFIG_PCI_DEBUG
>  - boot with the parallel port enabled, and send as much of the bootup 
>    output (and /proc/iomem and /proc/ioport) as possible
>  - boot with the parallel port disabled, and send the same output for that 
>    working case.
>
> I have no clue why the parallel port should matter, but it could change 
> some resource allocation issues.

It is the first time I heard about such a issue so it cannot be too
wide spread anyways. 

-Andi

RE: Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

[YhLu]

Don't always blame BIOS, if you like you could use LinuxBIOS instead....

YH 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andi Kleen [mailto:ak@muc.de] 
> Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 9:50 AM
> To: Linus Torvalds
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; Tech Support; 
> support@tyan.de; Andrew Morton; gl@fenedex.nl; 
> land@hetlageland.nl; hans@sww.nl; sww@sww.nl
> Subject: Re: Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports
> 
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 20 May 2005, Robert M. Stockmann wrote:
> >> 
> >> All problems of Tyan Opteron based machines silently locking up 
> >> during installation and/or during normal operation of 
> running Linux, 
> >> both 32bit and 64bit, without any display of kernel panic of any 
> >> other logging method, seem to be solved when switching off the 
> >> Parallel Port inside its BIOS.
> 
> The common Tyan problem case is when the machine has more 
> than 3GB of RAM and "memory remapping" is enabled to recover 
> the memory below the PCI memory hole. SOmething in that setup 
> leads to problems and random memory corruption. I suspect a 
> BIOS bug here.
> 
> Workaround is to not enable that option in the BIOS setup.
> 
> Then another older Tyan board (it might have been the K8W) 
> was *extremly* picky in what DIMMs it accepted and in what 
> slots because someone apparently didnt follow the AMD 
> specification for the memory controller trace lines fully. 
> That also caused common problems. 
> 
> 
> > Can you do an install with the thing turned off, and then
> >  - compile the kernel with CONFIG_PCI_DEBUG
> >  - boot with the parallel port enabled, and send as much of 
> the bootup 
> >    output (and /proc/iomem and /proc/ioport) as possible
> >  - boot with the parallel port disabled, and send the same 
> output for that 
> >    working case.
> >
> > I have no clue why the parallel port should matter, but it could 
> > change some resource allocation issues.
> 
> It is the first time I heard about such a issue so it cannot 
> be too wide spread anyways. 
> 
> -Andi
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe 
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Re: Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

[Peter J. Stieber]

YhLu> Don't always blame BIOS, if you like you could
YhLu> use LinuxBIOS instead...

Just curious, but why isn't this project (LinuxBIOS) mentioned on the 
Tyan web site, or is it and I just missed it?

You do work for Tyan, right?

Pete

Re: Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

[Bill Davidsen]

Peter J. Stieber wrote:
> YhLu> Don't always blame BIOS, if you like you could
> YhLu> use LinuxBIOS instead...
> 
> Just curious, but why isn't this project (LinuxBIOS) mentioned on the 
> Tyan web site, or is it and I just missed it?
> 
> You do work for Tyan, right?

What has that to do with anything? I doubt that suggestions about boot 
options are on the website or come from the Tyan website, either.

Note: I'm not endorsing LinuxBIOS for Opteron, I haven't personally 
tried it. But the value of the suggestion depends on how it works, not 
who makes it. There appear to be a lot of reports of problems with 
Opteron lately, if the BIOS isn't buggy then the documentation may have 
lost in translation.
-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me

Re: Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

[Peter J. Stieber]

YhLu>>> Don't always blame BIOS, if you like you could
YhLu>>> use LinuxBIOS instead...

PJS>> Just curious, but why isn't this project (LinuxBIOS)
PJS>> mentioned on the Tyan web site, or is it and I
PJS>> just missed it?
PJS>>
PJS>> You do work for Tyan, right?

BD = Bill Davidsen
BD> What has that to do with anything? I doubt that suggestions
BD> about boot options are on the website or come from the
BD> Tyan website, either.
BD>
BD> Note: I'm not endorsing LinuxBIOS for Opteron, I haven't
BD> personally tried it. But the value of the suggestion depends
BD> on how it works, not who makes it. There appear to be a
BD> lot of reports of problems with Opteron lately, if the BIOS
BD> isn't buggy then the documentation may have lost in
BD> translation.

I have been having the "memory.c bad pmds" with a Tyan S2885 
motherboard.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-May/msg01690.html
http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/linux-kernel/archive/2005-Week-19/1397.html

When Yhlu brought up the topic of LinuxBIOS, I thought he might be 
suggesting that this would prove there are no problems with the BIOS 
(i.e. the same problems would occur with LinuxBIOS as with the 
motherboards built-in BIOS). Looking at the LinuxBIOS web site, I got 
the impression (I may be wrong) that this was a Tyan supported effort. 
If that was the case I was wondering why Tyan didn't mention LinuxBIOS 
on their web site. It would make me more comfortable if this were a Tyan 
supported effort. That's why I asked the question.

I'm just trying anything I can to get rid of the bad pmd messages.

Pete