Archive for February, 2007

ASUS A7N8x Deluxe Linux (in)compatibility

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

Continuing in the vein of ’stupid hardware problems’, this week I discovered that the ASUS A7N8x deluxe motherboard I’ve been trying to nurse along as the backbone of my MythTV PVR basically doesn’t play nicely with linux, period. Don’t ask me why I didn’t try searching the web a little harder before, since most of the threads I’ve referenced below are ancient. Basically there is something screwy with its ACPI implementation, SATA controller, and just about everything else.

The issues apparently come and go with varying kernel versions, although I’m sure many folks don’t notice them since they don’t put the machine under heavy load or try to use both ethernet ports. For instance, the 3com and nvidia ethernet controllers absolutely will not stay bound to the same ethX devices after a warm reboot. Disabling one or the other ethernet card in the BIOS eliminates this problem fairly effectively.

Secondly, the machine crashes consistently under heavy I/O load. Sometimes it takes an hour, other times copying a video file from one drive to another will crash it immediately.

I’ve got it running with only a few crashes per week under FC5 by using the following kernel line

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2257.fc5 ro root=/dev/hda2 rhgb acpi=off noapic nolapic.

I’ve not yet tried an FC6 era kernel, but at this point since the general consensus is that the board runs windows reliably, I think I’m going to try and do some shuffling in order to make using windows on it a possibility.

References:

  • http://web.archive.org/web/20040117183728/http://attila.stevens-tech.edu/~dkopko/a7n8x.txt
  • http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=6946
  • http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/11/11/217

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Tyan Thunder K8W (s2885) Compatibility Notes

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

For some reason in the last 2 weeks I’ve been confronted with resolutions to a couple of ‘in-your-face’ long term compatibility problems. What is particularly annoying is that I’ve had the hardware in question for the better part of 3 years and just placed blame elsewhere. In any case, I’m just throwing this out there in case anyone is searching the web the way I was. Basically, the Tyan s2885 (Thunder k8w) dual opteron board has a buggy AGP chipset and/or windows drivers. I’ve had intermittent problems with various video cards culminating in purchasing a brand new Geforce 6800XT just so I could run Windows Vista with Aero enabled. I installed Vista just fine, and tried to boot it up for the first time, and the machine hung EVERY time it tried to enable Aero during the login. No amount of tweaking was able to get past the login screen.

A coworker of mine with the same machine had the exact same problem with Vista. After reinstalling back down to windows XP, he’s getting intermittent screen freezes throughout the day. I seem to only get them when I try to activate the intellimouse ‘zoom’ feature it so helpfully bound to my mouse button directly under my pinkie. Trying to start directX games will keel the machine over immediately as well.

Lending credence to the problem being in the chipset itself, last time I tried to run a linux desktop with FC5 or CentOS 4 I was basically unable to use it effectively due to screen lockups. At the time I was inclined to blame the x.org drivers for my video card. In any case, hopefully this saves some poor soul an hour or two of troubleshooting an intermittent display lockup problem.

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