Just to chime in on this subject... The AliMagic and VIA based motherboards have "broken" chipsets.
I've spoken to both companies engineers about this issue. This discussion arose because both chipsets have problems with DMA overlays when using the BT8xx type TV tuner cards... The problem is with clock timing (the famous broken clock timer chip!!!) and DMA xfers. As you push the udma speed the spurious clock pulses wreak havoc with the memory writes. The Windows drivers try to make the OS work around the problem... This may be why people are seeing corruption. Couple this with Civilme's statement on WD drives and lack of CRC DMA data checking, and it's a wonder that Linux even runs on these systems. Turning OFF DMA or reducing UDMA to 33 seems to help with this problem... Your milage may vary though... -JMS |-----Original Message----- |From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jussi Aalto |Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 4:39 PM |To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |Subject: Re: [expert] Disk corruption+A7V266-E+NFS+ext3 | | |On Wednesday 10 April 2002 21:21, Bjarne Thomsen wrote: |<snip> |>This happened 3 out of 3 times when he copied a 16Mb |>file from the file system on computer A to the file |>system on computer B by the program cp on the PC |>running LM 8.2. It has every time been an ext3 or ext2 |>file system that has been corrupted (maybe a coincidence). |> |> Ist this problem caused by |> (a) the VIA chipset? |> (b) the AMD processor? |> (c) the UDMA setting? |> (d) the IDE driver? |> (e) the ext2/ext3 FS? |> (f) the NFS system? |> (g) or something else? | |My experiences on my system: |a, c and g. g for buggy ide controller on motherboard (belongs |actually |to category a). | |BIOS update helped a little, still random corruption occurs especially |when copying from CD-ROM to HD. So to be sure when copying |files around I |switch DMA off. I've noticed that combination of WD disk and |VIA chipset |is lethal. When the hardware is piece of crap, even Linux |can't save your |ass. | |Advice for people buing new HW: if it's cheap (in price), |think again if |you can afford it! And to make your decision easier remember that |exceptions make the rule. ;) | |I've been considering IDE or SCSI controller (to PCI-bus), |could someone |tell if it's a solution to my problems or does the buggy mobo chipset |affect the PCI-bus too? | |Cheers, |J. | |> |> We have the advantage that we know how to |> produce the corruption? |> |> -- Bjarne Thomsen | |
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