Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-amd64 (299 mails)

[Kevin_Gassiot@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

So I am curious about any problems that you have had with your IWILL board.
I have one of those also, and after doing the install from DVD, when the
system goes to do the inital boot, the kernel immediately crashes.  I have
never been able to get this board to boot.  I took the working system disk
out of my TYAN based system, and put it into the IWILL system, and get the
same thing.  The IWILL board has 2 246's and 4 GB of memory in it....  It
is kind of on the back burner, waiting on the TYAN board to work correctly,
but I would like to get it working.  I may have to swap out the cpus or
memory to make sure that is not what is killing it....



Kevin Gassiot
Advanced Systems Group
Visualization Systems Specialist


Veritas DGC
10300 Town Park Dr.
Houston, Texas 77072
832-351-8978
kevin_gassiot@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx


|---------+--------------------------->
|         |           John            |
|         |           McCorquodale    |
|         |           <mcq@xxxxxxxxxxx|
|         |           h.edu>          |
|         |                           |
|         |           01/14/2004 08:56|
|         |           AM              |
|         |                           |
|---------+--------------------------->
  >---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                                                                                                                     |
  |        To:      Kevin_Gassiot@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx                                                                        |
  |        cc:      "Pettini, Don" <don@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, John McCorquodale <mcq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,                   |
  |        suse-amd64@xxxxxxxx, Darrell Shively <sused@xxxxxxxxx>                                                       |
  |        Subject: Re: [suse-amd64] Any success with Tyan Thunder K8W (s2885) ?                                        |
  >---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|




> Actually, the Tyan S2885 doesn't support DDR400 (PC3200) memory.  It only
> supports PC2700/PC2100/PC1600 DIMMS, so using the DDR400 could be a big
> part of your problem.  I have had a TYAN S2885 board for several months
now
> (even a prerelease board), and the main problem I have had is with the
AGP
> graphics.  There is a lot of work going on to get the AGP graphics/Nvidia
> drivers working correctly on this board, as far as BIOS updates to put
> proper values in the MTRRs, new drivers, kernel patches, etc..  There is
a
> kernel bug in the mtrr code that makes the system broken with over 4 GB
of
> memory.

Actually, actually, all of the above is now fixed except for the AGP write
bandwidth issue, which peaks at about 275MB/s for 4x and 335 MB/s for 8x
for as-yet unknown reasons.  Tyan asked for my benchmarks the other day and
for tips on installing SuSE and a -156 kernel, so I believe they may be
taking
a look.

The BIOS I'm running on the 2885 is the '0.01b' BIOS here (don't ask why
the numbering of what appears to be an improvement appears to break
sequence
back to zero):

  ftp://ftp.tyan.com/Chipset_AMD/K8/2885BIOS/

And there's an official beta here that doesn't include the "memory hole"
option which gets you your full N GB of memory available even with a big
AGP aperture:

  http://www.tyan.com/support/html/bios_support.html#beta

These also "unlock" the HT clock frequency, so you can easily bump to 800
MHz
and see those AMD signalling errata in action.  :)

I have managed to get everything on the board to work well except the
lmsensors support (which I haven't yet tried) and good AGP bandwidth.  The
AGP problem appears to be on Tyan's radar now and I verified that it works
fine on another 8151-carrying board (the Iwill DK8X) so I'm hopeful that
a solution will manifest.  When it does, I'll post a complete howto for the
S2885.

-mcq