RE: Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

YhLu
2005-05-25T17:14:55Z

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
> -
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