Re: sata_nv + SMP = broken?

From: Vladimir Lazarenko
Date: Sat Oct 22 2005 - 04:20:57 EST


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.

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.

On a second thought. Why would that only occur in SMP mode? Since now the box is with 3G ram, no SMP and it works like a charm. If I enable SMP - the hell breaks loose.

Anyone from the IDE drivers guru world has any ideas? :)

Regards,
Vladimir

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature