Tyan Opteron boards and problems with parallel ports

Robert M. Stockmann
2005-05-20T00:17:49Z

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