On Saturday 18 August 2001 09:52 am, Kirby Urner wrote:
> > YMMV, all the above is nothin but my own conjecture and opinions
> >
> >--
> >Tom Brinkman Galveston Bay
>
> I appreciate all the info. The impression I got from
> Civileme's post is that detection of this KT133? chipset
> is going to put the kernel in hobbled mode on boot,
> sans udma with real impact on performance, e.g. in the
> realm of cdr-burning.
First I'd like to clear up somethin I should have mentioned in my
previous post. The kt133 chipset for 100/200 FSB cpu's is a much
different animal than the kt133a or e for 133/266 cpu's. The AMD links
you provided in a previous post were either before the bug surfaced, or
were kt133, not kt133a/e related.
As far as 'hobbled', this just hasn't been my experience. I've had
a kt133a board for a few months now. Due to swapping hardware and
partitioning schemes around I've done several 8.0, Freq2 with various
kernels, installs. I've never had my HDD's hobbled by Mandrake. Quite
the contrary, they've always been very well optimized to the max during
Mandrakes install without me havin to do a thing.
Even with the 2.4.3, 8.0 stock kernel, they've been setup as udma5
during the Mandrake install. My Linux drive gets 35.96mb/sec with
hdparm -t. More importantly, I can load a dir with 38,000 .jpg's
(~3.9gig) in about 5 secs into X apps including Konqueror. I've also
not experienced any data corruption with large file cross ide
transfers.
I created a 650mb .zip file and burned it to a CDr, I then
transfered this file cross ide (CD or CD-RW to hda or hdb, all
combinations) using both Linux and W98 and checked for errors . There
never were any, and both Linux and Windoze could unzip the file and
it's original contents were intact. I've done this test many many times
over the past few months. I've also had no problems burning CD's from
HDD files, audio or data, or copying bootable CD's using Linux. I don't
even have any Windoze burning apps installed. IOW's I can't reproduce
the bug even when i'm daring it to show itself.
>
> Sounded to me like it didn't matter what other variables
> might be in play, i.e. I can count on this behavior given
> my chipset ("no ifs-ands-or-buts"). If so (civileme
> sounds authoritative and posts from mandrake.org), then
> really *not* too much is being made of the problem, from
> my point of view (a) as any board with this chipset is
> getting the same workaround and (b) the workaround doesn't
> really restore the board to full functionality.
Hasn't been my experience, and a lot of people I correspond with,
even one with a KT7a/Sb live/Western Digital HDD, none of us have had
any Linux or Windoze VIA-IDE problems. 'Course were all mostly oc'rs
and use quality components. Specially power supplies and cooling.
>
> So now I'm wondering what cosmic forces might, in the best
> possible world, conspire to make an 8.1 be worth installing
> over such a board, or is it a lost cause? What gives me
> hope is I'm under the impression WinME is getting the full
> udma features now, maybe because of a patch (seems VIA
> website is most concerned about the SB Live! problem --
> was reading elsewhere about bus cycles and buffers, maybe
> losing data because of the bridge design).
I've read several work-arounds. One from VIA is to raise Vcore to
1.82. Which I do, but mainly because I oc my Tbird. The other is to
raise IO to 3.5v. My Soyo provides 3.44 by default. Another is to run
a 133/266 Tbird at 100/200 (requires an unlocked cpu). I run at 135/270.
One is to run HDD's at PIO4 (which sux). My HDD's are at udma5 and my
CD and CDR drives are dma enabled also. 'Course the most advised fix is
to throw PCI SB live!'s in the trashcan. There's several controller
cards that are blamed too. I use the Soyo's onboard AC97 and integrated
2 IDE controller. Keep in mind also that this isn't a Linux problem,
it equally should affect other OS's including Windoze.
So while countless others, myself included, are doin everything
wrong, nobody's had bad problems. Hence, I still believe too much is
being made out of the bug. My experience says that's true at least for
me. YMMV, just as Civileme's seems to.
--
Tom Brinkman Galveston Bay
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