Hard disk IRQ timeout problems

Chris Evans (chris@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk)
Mon, 28 Jul 1997 16:47:28 +0100 (BST)


Hi,

I'm getting a few IRQ timeout problems. The initial few I saw were
terminal; endless timouts with the chipset reporting "Busy" after each
retry.

Since then I've seen several non-terminal timeouts during which the kernel
disables DMA, resets ide1, and continues. I will post an example of the
exact timeout message later when I get access to my personal machine. From
memory the status at timeout had threee flags in it, one of which I am
sure was "SeekComplete".

A few questions;

1) Are there any known problems with the firmware of the IBM DAQA 3.2Gb
drive? Does it have DMA problems?

2) I've also just purchased a new motherboard. I can't remember if I saw
the problems or not with my old mainboard and this new drive. The board is
Triton-VX based and is an "SM-5", manufacturer unstated. Any known
problems with this?

3) My Award BIOS can set I/O recovery time for 8 and 16bit I/O, anyone got
any good values to put in?

4) The new motherboard is higher performance than the last one. Could this
be exposing problems with my CPU? (To my horror I discovered very recently
that it is really a P75 overclocked to P100, new P200 or better CPU to
arrive at end of week....)

5) What chipset bugfix support do I want to be compiling in?

Kernels used are both 2.0.31-pre2 and 2.1.46.

Any suggestions/tests/further thoughts welcome.

Cheers,
Chris