[ILUG] disabling IRQ and SATA - Not Solved

[Eoin Ryan]

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but since it's an ongoing issue I
thought I might as well stick in my 2 cents worth...

I've had some experience recently getting Intel SATA controllers working
on Dell Poweredge 750's.  They caused me immense problems to get going,
standard 2.4.x & 2.6.x kernels (both Debian supplied + vanilla) failed
to detect the disks.

Using Jeff Garzik's libata2.4 patch, we managed to get a 2.4 kernel
running, however it used the disks in "Compatibility mode" so we got
horrible performance out of it (2/3MB/sec), and as there was a
controller sitting between the disks we couldn't set dma.

Garzik has patches on his folder in kernel.org, however they are
slightly out of date.  It turns out that he's moved over to using
Bitkeeper to store his most recent versions of the patches.  It took me
a while to get my head around this new way of doing things, but
essentially you do a:

bk clone http://gkernel.bkbits.net/libata-2.6

Which creates a cvs like repository of the *entire* kernel source.  Then
doing:

bk -r get

Pulls out all the actual kernel source out of the repository.  Now
you'll have a standard kernel source tree, and can configure and compile
the kernel as usual.

After over 3 weeks of kernel recompiles this method finally led to the
disks being detected as SCSI devices.. yay :D

Anyway, not sure if that's at all usefull, but there you go.

Eoin.

On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 09:32:03AM +0100, kevin wrote:
> Tried a few things last night, results were very confusing.
> 
> Loaded Mandrake 10.0 with 2.4 kernel and got a functioning system but on boot 
> up it was throwing a load of SATA errors. I installed the 2.6 kernel 
> alongside the 2.4 kernel from the rpm and the system refused to boot...even 
> into the 2.4.
> 
> I removed the bttv card, included acpi=off noapic, no luck. I tried installing 
> fedora core 2, which I have used on this machine before, the install froze at 
> the formatting stage.
> 
> Finally reinstalled Mandrake 10 (2.4) from scatch, installed fine, disk 
> formatted fine and seemed to work OK for 1/2 hour. Then I rebooted and it 
> came back with the "disabling IRQ" errors scrolling across the screen again. 
> I don't understand why it worked and then threw the error on reboot?? Also 
> the disk performance is terrible (hdparm results are 380M/S and 2M/S) hdparm 
> -d1 brings this up to 380 and 38 but it quickly seems to turn the DMA back 
> off again and drops back to the old values.
> 
> The hardware seems fine as the Win98 partition loads and runs great and I ran 
> it for a few hours to make sure. 
> 
> Any ideas appreciated.
> 
> Kevin.
> 
> 
> On Thursday 5 August 2004 13:25, kevin wrote:
> In the past I have used both the standard nv diver and the driver from nvidia
> on this machine. Both worked fine except for when switching to a non graphics
> run level ie runlevel 1 the screen was messed up with the nvidia driver, the
> nv driver never showed this problem. However on runlevel 5 it worked fine and
> opening a terminal from there was also fine so I could do command line stuff
> from there. I haven't loaded the nvidia driver since the problem started and
> have been using the standard nv driver. I will try noapic tonight and see
> what happens.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Kevin.
> 
> On Thursday 5 August 2004 12:26, Paul Jakma wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, kevin wrote:
> > The video card is based on nvidia geforce 4, I think it says
> > something like MX400 or MX440.
> 
> And you use the nvidia drivers?
> 
> If so, disable the nvidia drivers - at least, prevent the nvidia
> kernel modules from being loaded - and reboot. Does the problem go
> away?
> 
> If not, reboot with 'noapic' on the kernel command line, does the
> problem go away?
> 
> > 1. Remove both drives from IDE channel 1, switch off channel 1 in the bios.
> > 2. Add a new SATA card in one of the pci slots plus a sata drive
> >
> > 3. Also added a BTTV card in a PCI slot, this had been in the
> > machine about 6 months ago but was taken out.
> 
> seems reasonably sane hardware, all with decent drivers, apart from
> the Nvidia..
> 
> > Kevin.
> 
> regards,
> --
> Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
> Fortune:
> Q:	How was Thomas J. Watson buried?
> A:	9 edge down.
> 
> -- 
> Irish Linux Users' Group
> http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/

-- 
When you work here, you can name your own salary. I named mine, "Louie".
-
Eoin Ryan					eoin.ryan at ul.ie
Biocomputing-Developmental Systems Group (BDS)  http://bds.ul.ie
CSG-028, University of Limerick, Ireland	Phone: +353 61 202596
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