Re: Nforce2 66MHz IDE without idebus=xx and "Athlon-xp powersavingsystem lock"

From: Daniel Drake
Date: Fri Jan 16 2004 - 12:47:02 EST


Murilo Pontes wrote:
Athlon-xp powersaving lock-up: mm series disable 'Halt Disconnect and Stop Grant Disconnect' on boot!

Those patches are no longer included in -mm kernels.

Without mm patchs I disable it with "athcool" tool, kernel developers maybe include automatic disable 'Halt Disconnect and Stop Grant Disconnect' on Linus tree?

As you can probably guess, enabling the C1 disconnect bit should not cause system instability. Simply disabling the C1 disconnect bit is not a very good way of solving the problem. Thats why those earlier "fixes" are no longer included in the -mm tree.

Ross Dickson has been doing some good research here - it does seem to be a hardware/firmware related bug, the CPU acting too soon after coming out of a disconnect (not too sure on the details here, its a little over my head). The lockup bug (for me) only shows itself when I enable APIC/IO-APIC in my kernel configuration, the older XTPIC interrupt paths are slower and tend not to trigger this bug as much.

With Ross's patches, you can boot with an apic_tack argument. When this argument is "1" it will introduce a delay to get rid of the problem. When you use "2" it will only enable the delay when a lockup is predicted. For me, apic_tack=2 has solved the problem, with C1 disconnect on, and APIC/IO-APIC enabled.

There's one side effect that a few people have reported: The clock appears to skew, gains about 15 mins over the period of 4-5 days. I have experienced this too.

See this thread for more info:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=107199838022614&w=2

Daniel.
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