Hyperthreading, SATA, Live! 24b, PC

rianquinn · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 29

As of two months ago I realized windows sucks (I know Im slow). I am looking for the most stable Developer/Gamer OS I can find. So far Gentoo is on the top of my list. Here is my specs:

I appologize for the current moment, because of SMP some of the keys on my keyboard do not work. Hopefully you guys can help me with that.

Pentium 4 3.2ghz w/ Hyperthreading
1G Corsair DDR2 ram
nVidia 6600 GT Overlocked by BFG
2x 150 SATA Raptors (Western Digital)
Sound Blaster Live! 24b
Abit Dura-Max AA8 motherboard
AOPEN dvdr
Kingwin Aluminum case.

Here is what I have found so far.

Building gentoo using genkernel does not help because I still have to go through menuconfig to add support for SATA. Instead using pciutils works great at configuring my kernel for me. I do not like a blowded kernel.

SMP does not work. My keyboard, in gentoo simply does not work. And in FC3 and Linspire, it sometimes spits out garbage.

The sound blaster live! 24b still does not work.

And gentoo cannot find my Raid devices so I cannot set that up.

What I would like to see is my computer working, using SMP, Raid, and sound. But I do not know what to do. I see lots of people all having the same problem, but I do not see any solutions. I want to be able to help everyone by finding a solution.

I have followed the Gentoo Handbook, I enabled SMP with 8 possible cpus, and enabled Hyperthreading, Does not work.
I added ALSA support in the kernel, selecting all creative modules, that did not work.
I also tried fdisking to /dev/rd and that does not work

I did find one thing that might help someone who is reading this. If you have SATA devices you need to use /dev/sda and in the kernel you must add support for your motherboards SATA and SCSI support. Otherwise grub does not load. It asks for a bootable device upon loading.

Last question. I am using a uguru enabled motherboard. How do I get software to monitor my cpu usage, fan speed, etc... Also, how do I know that the kernel supports my chipset. Thanks guys, Anything you know is help full. Hopefully we can all work together to solve these problem for myself and others.

Rian

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 10:49 pm Post subject:

rianquinn,

Please post the output of the lspci command. You may need to emerge pciutils.

I suspect you have fakeraid, provided by the BIOS. That can be made to work.
Your sound card will work too.
SMP for Hyperthreading is straightforward.

Your lspci will show what we need to know.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

msalerno · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 10:53 pm Post subject:

For straters I would drop the genkernel. Use the gentoo-sources. If you have not already done so, spend the time to go option by option. Rather than trying to get everything working at once, focus on just the CPU first.

1. Why do you think that SMP & Hyperthreading are not working?
2. Is your keyboard USB? PS2?
3. What kind of raid are you setting up? I guess that your motherboard has a raid controller, did you see if there was a driver available?

rianquinn · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 29

When I boot the kernel I see two penguins, so I know that Linux sees two cpus (or thinks it see two cpus at least) the problem is once the kernel boots up, the keyboard does not respond. You can tell because the num lock key stops working as well. However if I turn off hyperthreading, it works fine. I have read a lot of forums about this problem, but did not see any solutions. As for the raid part, when I try to use fidsk, it does not see my hard drive. I have tried, sda, and rd under the /dev folder and both do not seem to work. Any suggestions. At the current moment I am about to re-install using stage three ios 2005.0.

As regards to the kernel, could the reason why hyperthreading does not work be because of how I am setting up the kernel. The only reason I find this hard to believe is because even gentoos livecd freezes up the keyboard once it boots. The odd thing is the keyboard works fine until about halfway through the kernel portion of booting. And it is before you get the option to select verbose mode (I know because the F2 key does not work)

My keyboard is a ps/2, and the mouse is USB (mx laser by logitech)

Thanks guys for your help.

Once I get gentoo up I will run the lspci command and post the output for you. Is there a way to do that during the install of gentoo?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jul 02, 2005 12:18 am Post subject:

rianquinn,

Turn off hypertherading if thats whats needed to get your install to start.
lspci is on the liveCD, you can run it any time, providing your keyboard works.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

rianquinn · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 29

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 925X Memory Controller Hub (rev 04)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 925X PCI Express Root Port (rev 04)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev d3)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FR (ICH6/ICH6R) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corp. 82801FR/FRW (ICH6R/ICH6RW) SATA Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0140 (rev a2)
0000:02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
0000:02:02.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
0000:02:05.0 Network controller: RaLink Ralink RT2500 802.11 Cardbus Reference Card (rev 01)
0000:02:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy LS

I got this using linspire. I don know how to send the information via gentoo in a command line environment. All I have to connect to the internet that I know of is links2 and that doesn let me use the forum.

I am currently trying to get started on the install, I booted using the livecd without hyperthreading and the keyboard works perfectly (obviously with the hyperthreading I can do a thing). I then moved to the /dev/rd directory to use fdisk. The problem is all I get is a list frmo 0 to 15. fdisk says I should see something like c0d0, but all I see it numbers. How do I format my raided harddrive. In windows land, after supplying the raid drivers in the begining of the install, the computer would see only one harddrive (the two put together). Is linux like this, or am I missing something.

rianquinn · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 29

Ok I found this website:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Software_RAID

I learned something as well. Almost all SATA Raid devices are actually Software Raid devices or (Fake-Raid). Therefor, linux does not see the Raid device as one harddrive like windows does. Instead, you have to follow the above process to set up a Raid array. I however do not like the suggested setup. Instead I would setup my boot and /home partitions as Raid 1 (because you cannot strip a boot, and I would want a backup for all of my personal files) and the /root and swap devices I would want Raid 0 so that I could see an increase in system speed (or simply put, increase the speed at which my computer loads applications including KDE)

As for the sound card:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml

This documentation shows how to install your sound card drivers. Surprisingly enough, the SB Live! 24b is supported. The driver is

ca0106 - http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php?vendor=vendor-Creative_Labs#matrix

I went through the kernel, and I did see under alsa a driver for SB Live! 24b. This should work. Finally, you have to emerge the alsa drivers which the above link describes.

So it seems like two of my problems might be solved. However we will not know until I try it. I will, as I go along, try to document everything, and post it to the forum. Including the menuconfig options I chose.

I still need help with the keyboard problem. Gentoo livecd really does not like the hyperthreading enabled. However I can install without it. I simply disabled Hyperthreading in my Bios.

If anyone has any idea what to do about my keyboard hanging up when I have hyperthreading enabled, please let me know. in the mean time, I will enabled in the Kernel, SMP and Hyperthreading, but leave Hyperthreading turned off in my Bios. Thanks again for all your help guys,

Rian

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jul 02, 2005 5:06 pm Post subject:

rianquinn,

If you want Windows compatable raid, you can use dmraid. It has its own Beta liveCD here http://tienstra4.flatnet.tudelft.nl/~gerte/gen2dmraid/
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

rianquinn · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 29

Solved:

Here what I have so far. I will be updating more results of informational purposes.

When the kernel boots, using IRQ routing, it sets the IRQ for all the devices in your computer. For some reason, when hyperthreading is turned on, this function gets all messed up because the routing function tries to divide the device tasks up one per processor. If you have the combination, one usb mouse, and one ps/2 keyboard, you will have a problem with this setup. The most common symptom is the keyboard freezes. You can tell because the caps and num lock don work. The solution I found that works is by changing the mouse to a ps/2 setup. My mouse came with a usb to ps/2 converter, and if you do not have one you can get one almost anyware (best buy, circuit city). Then in your bios, make sure that either both the mouse and the keyboard are setup for USB SUPPORT on the BIOS or OS. Do not mix the two. Both must be on one or the other. This of course only applies if you have the same problem. As for what I can see, several people do. This was the solution for my computer.

Other observations that I found where that ACPI and APIC both have problems with hyperthreading. For some reason, APIC wants to mess around with the IRQ routing as well. If the mouse keyboard scheme doesn help you, try adjusting your ACPI and APIC functions, both in bios and in the kernel. You would be suprised, most of these functions in todays computers are not used simply because they have not worked right from day one.

I can say with a happy smile that I have never seen my computer run faster. This is a true testimony to Linuxes speed. Gentoo is a powerful tool, and I have learned a lot. Finally windows stinks, and I can see a reason why any nerd should use it. (Besides maybe games)

I will finish my install, and continue to post as much as can. Hopefully everything works out!!!! Thanks guys for your help!

Rian

rianquinn · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 29

Yet another update

About the Alsa drivers for the Sound Blaster Live! 24b. One thing I learned is you do not want to compile the kernel with the Alsa driver built into the kernel. You want to install them as Modules. I made this mistake and learned the hard way. Thanks to Gentoo Forums, this was solved. I am currently emerging xmms to test the results. If you build the kernel with Module support for the sound card, (which is advised because you don't have to re-emerge the alsa drivers after compiling the kernel every time), make sure you use alsaconf to configure your Modules, and then rc-update them. This is well documented in the Alsa Gentoo documentation.

As for the raid devices let me say that they are difficult to get working. First off, every time you have to chroot into your linux environment, you have to re-write your raidtab and resync the devices. This can take a long time if you have a large device on Raid 1. I set up my disks as 100M Raid 1 for boot, 2000M (Because I gig of ram) for the swap (on both drives), 10G Raid 0 for Root, and 20G Raid 1 for Home. This seems to work really well because my OS runs really fast. I emerged X11 in 1 hour. And on top of that, my home drive is on Raid 1 so if one drive crashes, I loose all of my root files (which doesn't really matter because I can always re-install them) , but my home (Personal, important file) are saved. This type of setup (to my knowledge) you can't do in windows.

So is it worth it. Absolutely. But expect to make mistakes, and make sure you have lots of coffee, and time.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 8:38 am Post subject:

rianquinn,

You have too much faith in raid1.
IF one drive fails because of the drive, you will probably get /home back from the other drive. If you have a motherboard problem, the raid may work perfectly and both halve of your mirror will be the same and wrong.

Raid is not a substitue for backups.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

rianquinn · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 29

I totally agree. Thats why buaght a nice dvd burner. Raid1 is simply one more thing that could help protect your information.

About the Sound Blaster live! 24b. Don't emerge xmms-alsa after installing xmms. My sound stopped after that. Also... I found that the oss output plugin worked much better than the the asa one. For some reason the alsa driver was making a lot of static.