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keifir
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 10 Jun 2002
Posts: 119
Location: Canada
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 Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 12:24 am Post subject: Hard freeze with nForce2 under heavy disc IO |
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Hi ppl,
I will try to make this quick - there has been quite a bit of discussion about nforce2 already.
My problem is this: My machine would lock when I make it do some heavy disc IO(md5sum, xmule - shared files hashing). I resolved it by doing the following:
- setting DMA to udma4 :
| Code: | | hdparm -d1 -X udma4 /dev/hda |
- switching to ck-sources-2.4.22
- compiling kernel with no ACPI
- compiling kernel with no APIC
- disabling 'APIC function' in mobo BIOS
- choosing Nvidia IDE support in kernel
- disabling USB2.0 support in BIOS (EHCI)
As you can see I have done a lot of guesswork. I think what fixed my freezes is setting dma to udma4. I'm not sure if I even need to use ck-sources - my machine had uptime of 3 days with gentoo-sources-2.4.20 before I decided to fire up xmule and let it hash.
So, naturally now I'm contemplating to going back to gentoo-sources. Has anyone else been able to reproduce a freeze like this? What was your solution?
My hardware: MSI K7N2-L, AMD1800+, 512MB Dual Channel DDR400
Thanx for reading this. |
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paulisdead
Guru
Joined: 10 Apr 2002
Posts: 510
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 1:08 am Post subject: |
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I had that on my abit nf7-s v2, but I'm not 100% sure what I changed that fixed it. For one thing I've been using the ac-sources since it stopped, though 2.4.22 and 2.6 have worked well for me. I also have AMD Viper ATA-66 Override enabled in IDE under the kernel. I also stopped using hdparm to set DMA on the drive, and just let the kernel take care of that.
| Code: | root@deepthought gimp # hdparm -tT /dev/hda5
/dev/hda5:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1976 MB in 2.00 seconds = 988.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 140 MB in 3.03 seconds = 46.20 MB/se |
So the drive still runs very fast without DMA set with hdparm.
_________________
"we should make it a law that all geeks have dates" - Linus |
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keifir
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 10 Jun 2002
Posts: 119
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 1:24 am Post subject: |
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thx for reply,paulisdead,
this gives me some hints.
i just verified that hdparm is not to blame here: just set my drive to udma5 and ran that hashing again - all is fine.
I looked at my IDE settings:
- 'Generic IDE chipset support' is disabled
- 'AMD Viper ATA-66 Override' is disabled
So, eliminating IDE DMA from the list of suspects, I will go through the rest of them sometime tomorrow. Now it seems that it's ACPI/APIC that was causing all this trouble. |
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Nermal
Apprentice
Joined: 18 Apr 2002
Posts: 259
Location: UK
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| Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 9:42 am Post subject: |
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| paulisdead wrote: | I had that on my abit nf7-s v2, but I'm not 100% sure what I changed that fixed it. For one thing I've been using the ac-sources since it stopped, though 2.4.22 and 2.6 have worked well for me. I also have AMD Viper ATA-66 Override enabled in IDE under the kernel. I also stopped using hdparm to set DMA on the drive, and just let the kernel take care of that.
| Code: | root@deepthought gimp # hdparm -tT /dev/hda5
/dev/hda5:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1976 MB in 2.00 seconds = 988.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 140 MB in 3.03 seconds = 46.20 MB/se |
So the drive still runs very fast without DMA set with hdparm. |
Hrm... I have the same board as you and have the same problem.... Freezes when doing stuff like prelinking, and even when it was fscking the disk after 37 reboots (which is a little odd, as hdparm wasn't started by then.. but anyway..)
I get the same problem under 2.4.22 an even worse under 2.6.x 
I'll try the AMD viper thingy and maybe stopping hdparm.
With regards to the ACPI and APIC stuff, enabling ACPI made the system go tits up big time, but I need to have APIC enabled to get any kind of IRQ routing working. 
Thanks for the info |
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keifir
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 10 Jun 2002
Posts: 119
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2003 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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So, I finally found the solution to freezes:
- Disabled APIC support for uniprocessors
- Disabled ACPI support
Now my system is solid. On a side note, AMD Viper ATA-66 override setting had no effect on my machine.
This means that I will go back to gentoo-sources-2.4.20. I see no reason for now to have APIC/ACPI enabled on my system - all the power management is done through APM.
Does anyone have any ideas of where APIC support might be useful or necessary?
Thanx, everyone for your input! |
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Nermal
Apprentice
Joined: 18 Apr 2002
Posts: 259
Location: UK
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| Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2003 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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APIC is suppose to effectively double the amount of IRQs in a machine.
It doesn't work very well atm by the looks of things, but you could use it if you have a lot of stuff sharing one IRQ or too many things in your system |
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