On Friday 17 August 2001 21:06, Kirby Urner wrote:
> I notice Abit KT7A is green lined at Mandrake website,
> meaning tested.  My KT7E uses same VIA KT133E /VIA 686B
> chipset.  So maybe I shouldn't be fearing some VIA bug
> after all (savvy guy Brinkman was suggesting Abits could
> be problematic, yet none of the Soyo MBs listed at
> Mandrake are green lined :-D).
>
> AMD brags about Apollo chipset here:
> http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/20114.html (June last year)
> recommends KT7 Socket A MBs here:
> http://www1.amd.com/athlon/mbl/index/1,1503,,00.html
>
> If there was some disconnect between AMD and Abit over
> VIA/Apollo chipset, I don't find any mention at the
> website.
>
> So I guess I'll try to install 8.0 after all, now that
> I've fixed the silly floppy disk problem.  Fingers
> crossed.  No wait, still need a good MDK install disk.
> I'm going .iso right now, try before buy.
>
> Kirby

You face yet another problem.  There is --no ifs ands or buts-- a _hardware problem_ 
with the
686B southbridge, and another with the KT133A Northbridge.  When our 8.0 kernel sees 
the chipset
it will dive into crippled mode with DMA turned off.  hdparm will report it turned on 
but you will
be unable to burn CDRWs and CD-Rs and the behavior will be rather more sluggish than 
not.

This is (halfway) fixed in our most recent kernel update, meaning we have a workaround 
for the 
_hardware_ bug, but not a high-performance one.  Your computer will seem fairly 
normal, having
jumped from 1.8Mb/S to 13.40Mb/s ide read speed as measured by the benchmark programs, 
but will be
well below the expected benchmarks of 31.9 to 36.2 Mb/S as is usual for udma4 or udma5 
operation.

Civileme

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