On 4 Oct 2002, Peter L. Hurd wrote:
> The kernel in 8.0 does not play well with the southbridge vt8233a
> chipset.
That's not been my experience; I just installed Psyche on Wednesday,
and in my (admittedly brief) tests, I haven't noticed any problems.
My (main) system is:
Asus A7V333 motherboard (BIOS version 1011)
AMD Athlon XP 1900+
512MB Crucial DDR PC2100 (1 DIMM, part number CT6472Z265)
Western Digital WD800JB hard drive (primary IDE master)
Afreey 56x CD-ROM drive (secondary IDE master)
> My experience with James Ralston's patch for this chipset under the
> null beta has been excellent. I have had no problems at all with my
> vt8233a machines running this patched kernel (2.4.18-11).
Ah, but Red Hat (specifically, Arjan) integrated vt8233a support into
the final (null) kernel:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=72542
I just downloaded Psyche's kernel-2.4.18-14.src.rpm, ran
"rpmbuild -bp", and compared my patch line-for-line against it. The
only differences are:
1. The 2.4.18-14 kernel is actually using a slightly newer
version of via82cxxx.c (3.35) than my patch provided (3.34);
the newer version (3.35) supports the new VIA vt8235
southbridge (commonly found on KT400 chipsets, but it can also
be found on KT333 chipsets as well).
2. Arjan didn't update the comments at the top of ide-timing.h,
so it looks like ide-timing.h wasn't updated. That is *not*
the case; ide-timing.h was patched as well.
In short, not only did Red Hat incorporate my vt8233a southbridge
patch into the kernel, they pulled more recent bits than I used.
(I'll go update my web page accordingly.)
> Machines running the unpatched 2.4.18-14 kernel start segfaulting
> after 24-48hrs of uptime.
This sounds to me more like defective hardware (related to memory,
most likely) than a hardware compatibility problem.
> Could someone (James, pretty please?) make a patch for 2.4.18-14?
I can't, because my patch is already in there. :O
I suspect that either there's defective hardware at play, or there are
problems with the vt8233a southbridge, but only on certain
motherboards.
(Those of you who are having problems: I suggest you include the exact
make, model, and BIOS version of your motherboard when you post...)
--
James Ralston, Information Technology
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
