The HyperNews Linux KHG Discussion Pages

## one more time

  Forum: Device Drivers
  Re: INTEL 430 TX- DMA/33 DRIVERS (Niko)
  Re: 2.1.43 kernel has TX (Matthew Prete)
  Keywords: 430TX TX IWILL
  Date: Fri, 07 Nov 1997 14:17:29 GMT
  From: matt <spokesman_a@prete.com>

folks keep emailing me to see if i have any more ideas about this so i guess there's still interest. i'm back just to recap (i don't mind answering the emails, but why not knock'em all off at once :) i had two problems with my TX chipset iwill motherboard and RedHat linux: 1. "unknown PCI device" errors 2. reboot very early, very quickly, right after those errors so you couldn't really read them. the unknown PCI device errors were fixed by the 2.1.43 kernel, but it was a real pain in the neck to build because of all of the tools that needed updating also. however, the reboot problem continued. i changed clockspeeds, cpus (intel, amd, cyrix) i swapped memory (sdram, edo) and i even tried caldera's linux and redhat 3 instead of 4. i also swapped for another iwill motherboard, same model, then i swapped for an abit motherboard, no tx chipset. i also tried win95 and NT. no question, the problem was with this model of the iwill motherboard running linux. OK? after watching a zillion reboots, i became convinced that the problem was in the bogomips thingy. if you are seeing different behavior, we may not be talking about the same problem. now, that very same broken system, on 3 random occasions, booted linux just fine: everything worked those three times. so, my conclusion is that there is one problem with the board, and it's some kind of a timing thing that is uncovered by the bogomips thingy, and it's probably a one line code fix -- i'm thinking, if you could just get by that one thing, it would be smooth sailing. hmmm... so that gives me an idea: could that calibration routine easily be replaced by a reasonable approximation of the timing that it's trying to figure out? not a long term solution, but just to test the theory that it's just one little bug... i wish i had tried that then but i didn't think of it. what i thought of was launching the boot into a debugger, something i don't know how to do and figured wasn't worth learning for this particular problem since there are 100's of other motherboards that work just fine. i returned mine :) good luck to anybody who doesn't :( have that option - matt