Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-amd64 (470 mails)

["Jan Meyer" <jan_webmail@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

recently I tried to install Suse v9.1-AMD64 on my Athlon64 machine with
an MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R (MS-6702) board. [Kernel was updated to 2.6.4-54.5]

To make the story short: During various stages (after finishing the
installation and trying to fix issues like an incorrectly formatted swap
partition), I had my only SATA drive connected to either of the two SATA
controllers (and always the other one disabled). Still I encountered
many complete system freezes and recently mainly kernel oopses, which -
as far as I can tell - were related to either access to the SATA HDD or
a PATA device on the VT8237 controller.

Even though I can finally boot the system, strangely yast2 is broken in
a way that I get "import 'SCR' failed" errors. [I was only fiddling with
modules.dep and initrd.]

Unless you have a better idea, I have now made up my mind that I should
take the windows approach and format-and-reinstall Suse9.1. But before I
start with that and run into the same problems:

Can you recommend to me which of the IDE controllers I should use? Which
one has the most stable amd64 kernel modules?

Or should I consider patching the kernel (for a recent sata_via patch 
see also: http://lwn.net/Articles/76129/ ) - or possibly using a kraxel 
kernel?

Would system stability increase if I switched to a 32-bit kernel? Maybe
the SATA controllers are not the problem?

Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

best regards,

    Jan

P.S.: On the Via VT8237 my SATA hdd is now recognized as /dev/hda.
Should it not be /dev/sda as on the Promise?

PPS: When I got the system to run after switching the SATA drive from
Promise to VT8237, the hardware autorecognition feature offered me to
add the sata_via module to initrd. I said 'yes' and my initrd got
screwed in a way that I could not boot anymore. It took me quite a while
to recreate a workable initrd - and still I got error messages that
mkinitrd could not check the dependencies in modules.dep for sata_via.
Maybe something is wrong with the mkinitrd script?

PPPPS. I also have a recent NVidia based graphic card, which takes an
AGP aperture of 128MB. Running the suse install CD in rescue mode, I
noticed that a module called nvram was loaded - what is that for?

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