----- Original Message -----
From: "D. Hugh Redelmeier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Discussion List for Linux on Abit Motherboards" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2000 9:03 AM
Subject: re: [LINUX-ABIT] a cautionary tale
> | From: Andre Hedrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> Thanks for responding. I'm very interested in what you post, but
> first I must say that it really doesn't relate to what I intended to
> say in my message.
Think Andre simply replied to the other thread with all the HPT discussions
and patches.
> My message was warning about a design "feature" of the board that
> limits the total number of bus mastering boards in PCI slots 4 and 5
> to one. This was not explained at all in my manual, and needs to be
> made very clear to all who might try to sonfigure a BP6 system.
Yep, it's a nasty feature, I've put stickers inside my case to remind me
when I change cards. It's the kind of stuff that the mags don't mention
when reviewing the BP6.
> I think that your message shows that your IDE code makes the HPT366
> perform wonderfully. Even with shared interrupts. Even with 2.2.18
> (with your patches, I presume).
Andre's BP6 has always behaved itself, I have suspicions that he got an
early board, and later ones were built using slightly differenet components
(cheaper?). The Rev 1.1 board capaciter fiasco makes me wonder... At LUG
visit, I met another BP6 owner, and he'd had to solder his new board, I just
find it incredible that the dealer & Abit wouldn't exchange, as it obviously
was not of merchantable quality.
The concept I saw that best explained the acceptance of poor stability was
an article explaining the idea of "MS Windows Quality Hardware", as someone
already posted you can't debug H/W problems, with an unstable OS, and vice
versa. Win users blame the OS not the H/W for anything strange.
> It is interesting that hd[abc] are on the HPT366; I thought that these
> would normally be on the Intel 440BX chipset's IDE controler. Your
> timings don't include anything on the BX's controler, so we don't see
> how the HPT366 compares.
There's a kernel configuration option, possibly only available with Andre's
IDE patch, and you probably need to opt for experimental features too. It's
called something like 'pci offboard IDE controller first', in the help file
it talks about passing 'pci=reverse' to the kernel on booting.
Hope this helps
Rob
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