Re: Odd 2.0.35 problems with APM on VIA motherboards

Jamie Lokier (lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
Fri, 4 Sep 1998 04:00:14 +0100


On Thu, Sep 03, 1998 at 09:16:13AM +0200, Andrew Derrick Balsa wrote:
> It seems the VIA BIOS APM code malfunctions when powering down/up the
> hard disks. This is not at all my area of competence, so I am CC'ing
> the maintainers of the APM code.

Please note, I have a VIA VP2/97 based board which I use with APM with
no APM-related problems. My system powers down the disk along with
other things after 15 minutes idle time, which happens quite a few times
per day. It runs for weeks like this.

(It is an FIC-PA2007 + AMD K6/233 + Quantum FB ST 6.4G drive).

I've not tried setting the hard disk to power itself down when there's
no disk activity. Just used the BIOS power down settings, including the
one for powering down the disk. This means, for example, that when I
hit a key to bring it back, the disk spins up (and Linux is paused while
this happens). I expect there is some Linux setting whereby the disk
only spins up when there is pending disk activity, and Linux does not
need to pause when the machine comes out of the idle state.

[Other, perhaps related problem: I can get total lockups when using UDMA
if I don't also use hdparm -X34, but I get them whether APM is enabled
or not. With -X34 I've experienced no problems at all.]

-- Jamie

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