I haven't been following this thread so please make allowances if the following has already been covered. I had problems with setting dma on with my MSI 6593 motherboard (KT3 Ultra2-C) with SuSE 8.1 Pro. I also got that message:
<4>VP_IDE: Unknown VIA SouthBridge, contact Vojtech Pavlik (my board is an msi KT3 Ultra2, via kt333 chipset).
In my case the VIA chip was the 8235. In the driver file via82cxxxc it was listed under FUTURE_BRIDGES. I found a patch from Vojtech Pavlik, applied it to via82cxxx.c and lo! dma "on" worked. Since then I have upgraded to the latest SuSE 8.1 kernel and drivers all is still well (k_athlon-2.4.19-167). And the 8235 has been moved out of FUTURE_BRIDGES. I hope that wasn't just so much static! -- Geoff Horn