Re: sata_nv + SMP = broken?

From: Rafael J. Wysocki
Date: Fri Oct 21 2005 - 15:38:25 EST


Hi,

On Friday, 21 of October 2005 18:16, Marc Perkel wrote:
>
> Vladimir Lazarenko wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > Yesterday I've tried launching various kernels on Ahtlon64 Dual-core
> > X2 3800+ with MSI Neo4 Platinum SLI motherboard.
> >
> > The results were a total catastrophica failure. As soon as I enable
> > SMP in the kernel, the sata driver would randomly hang after a bit of
> > disk activity.
> >
> > Whenever apic is enabled, the system won't even be able to boot up
> > completely, and will hang VERY soon. Whenever I disable apic, the
> > system is able to bootup, but when the software mirror that I use will
> > try to resync for 2-3-10 mins, it will throw up a message and freeze
> > again.
> >
> > Whenever I disable apic AND lapic, the system is able to bootup AND
> > work, however after same 5-10 minutes it start spitting messages,
> > which are somewhat different thou and don't hang the system completely
> > but render it rather unusable anyway.
> >
> > As soon as I disable SMP - everything works like a charm.
> >
>
> For what it's worth I too have seen this same problem. It happens when I
> use the stock Fedora kernels but not my custom compiled kernel. I'm not
> sure what I compiled differently but at the time I thought that
> something in the new kernel fixed it.

I only use kernel.org kernels, so perhaps there's a problem with the Fedora
kernel.

> I too am running an Athlon X2 using sata_nv. I have an ASUS motherboard.
> But what I noticed was that the problem went away if I used 2 gigs of
> ram instead of 4 gigs. When you use the whole 4 gigs there is some
> memory mapping going on and I thought perhaps the problem was related to
> the sata_nv not liking the memory mapped over the 4gig barrier.

That's possible. Unfortunately I cannot verify this, since there are 2GB of
RAM in my box.

I remeber someone having a problem with sata_nv DMAing over 2GB of RAM,
so there may be something wrong with it.

Greetings,
Rafael
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/