Mailing List Archive: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs

(abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs

Sep 5, 2004, 8:31 PM

Post #1 of 10 (4029 views)

[originally posted on Gentoo forums]

First time Gentoo user, long time Debian user.

Abit AV8 (K8T800)
Athlon 3500+
WD Raptor 36.7GB SATA
Radeon 9200 128MB PCI (so nothing in the AGP slot)
tulip nic (Linksys card)
2004.2 (install from Minimal Live CD)
kernel-2.6.7-gentoo-r14 (no ACPI)
x.org
boot with noapic otherwise SATA drive is not recognized

- Initial Xorg -configure, hung the system.
- scanpci, hangs the system
- pcitweak -l, hangs the system (-l is "list")

No core dump comes through on the virtual console. It just hangs.

It is my understanding from reading the developer docs that X will
always probe (for xf86) the PCI bus on startup. So my hypothesis is that
it is failing for the same reason that scanpci and tweakpci are failing.

No problem with lspci. /proc/pci reports that the radeon 9200 is on
PCI:0:8:0. I've tried specifying this in the xorg.conf, hoping that this
will let is skip probing, but no such luck.

pcitweak -l prints out each device found in order. Interestingly, it
does not hang the system until after it has printed out the final
device, 0:18:3.

The PCI nic works fine. In addition to the tulip nic (PCI:0:0a:0) and
radeon (PCI:0:8:0) on the PCI bus, I have a (currently not used)
DWL-520+ wireless nic (PCI:0:0c:0).

Looking at the Xorg (/usr/portage/distfiles) sources, scanpci and
pcitweak -l do more or less the same thing:

xf86EnableIO();
xf86scanpci(0);
xf86DisableIO();

Maybe I need to take this to an Xorg mailing list.

But I guess what I'm really looking for here is confirmation whether
anyone else has experienced a similar problem on this motherboard.

It's hard to say whether it makes a difference, but is anyone else using
this motherboard with a PCI video card and nothing in the AGP slot? Or,
does any have the ability to test this?

I don't own a 4x/8x AGP card to test this with.

I'm willing to do as much as I can to get this working.

Advice?

Thanks,

--dircha

[update]

I tried removing all PCI cards and putting the radeon 9200 in the slot
the tulip nic had been in (as I knew that worked).

At one point pcitweak -l completed successfully, but subsequently
attempting to start X hung the system. After reboot, I could not
reproduce this success, so I suspect it was a fluke.

It does appear to be the system that is hanging, as I can not ssh into
the machine after it does.

I don't have much experience with gdb. Although I'm going to give that a
try now.

Thanks,

--dircha

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Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs [ In reply to ]

1i5t5.duncan at cox

Sep 6, 2004, 10:18 AM

Post #2 of 10 (3971 views)

Permalink

dircha posted <413BDA0C.6010309@dircha.com>, excerpted below, on Sun, 05
Sep 2004 22:31:24 -0500:

> It's hard to say whether it makes a difference, but is anyone else using
> this motherboard with a PCI video card and nothing in the AGP slot? Or,
> does any have the ability to test this?

Not that mobo, but I WAS using a PCI Radeon 7000 dual video-out for
awhile, after that kernel rc that broke on amd64 killed my 7500 AGP dual
out. I never traced the problem, but if I left the thing in text mode
(graphics mode/X wouldn't trigger it) to long the screen would get a bunch
of white vertical stripes in it that I couldn't cure altho the rest of the
computer stayed workable, without a reboot. When I bought a new card, I
made it a Radeon 9200SE AGP dual output, and it works fine.

I'm wondering if whatever issues you may be experiencing as probe lockups
were the same ones that gave me those vertical stripes? (BTW, the old PCI
card is still there in its slot, just not used for anything. No trouble
with it that way, and if it'll work with Xinerama.. the original reason I
got a PCI card in the first place. However, I know the old xfree radeon
driver didn't want to work with two cards, here, but that was back with
kernel 2.4. Haven't tested since, tho I keep thinking I will at some
point, thus my reason for still having the thing in the PCI slot.)

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin

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Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs [ In reply to ]

dircha at dircha

Sep 6, 2004, 1:25 PM

Post #3 of 10 (3975 views)

Permalink

[update from the forums]

> Have you tried booting with pci=noapic ??

I didn't know about that flag. Thank you.

Booting with pci=noapic allows the pcitweak -l scan to complete
successfully, ...at least more frequently.

I wonder whether I don't just have some flakey hardware here. Which is
why it would be interesting to find someone else running on this
motherboard.

Attempting to start X even with the vga or vesa driver still hangs the
system. Default scanpci still hangs the system. As does Xorg -configure.

However - as expected - scanpci -O always works, just as lspci would.

I'll try a few things to verify that my xorg.conf is correct and is not
the problem. I'm not trying to do dri.

But perhaps this means the issue is with this motherboard and how Xorg
probes the PCI bus.

...In which case I should probably report this in Xorg's bugzilla.

Any other ideas?

--dircha

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Re: Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs [ In reply to ]

dircha at dircha

Sep 6, 2004, 1:30 PM

Post #4 of 10 (3970 views)

Permalink

Duncan wrote:
> I'm wondering if whatever issues you may be experiencing as probe
> lockups were the same ones that gave me those vertical stripes?
> (BTW, the old PCI card is still there in its slot, just not used for
> anything. No trouble with it that way, and if it'll work with
> Xinerama.. the original reason I got a PCI card in the first place.
> However, I know the old xfree radeon driver didn't want to work with
> two cards, here, but that was back with kernel 2.4. Haven't tested
> since, tho I keep thinking I will at some point, thus my reason for
> still having the thing in the PCI slot.)

Right, the reason I got the PCI card was so that whenever I get to
picking up a second monitor for this system, I can pair up the video cards.

I'm going to see whether I can get ahold of a newer AGP card that I can
try here, and if that doesn't work, I'll have to think about replacing
the motherboard with the similar Asus one.

--dircha

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Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs *SOLVED* [ In reply to ]

dircha at dircha

Sep 6, 2004, 3:57 PM

Post #5 of 10 (3967 views)

Permalink

Problem solved by user 'malloc' in the forums.

Adding both pci=noapic,routeirq at boot allows the X startup probe to
complete successfully.

Works.

--dircha

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Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs *SOLVED* [ In reply to ]

miguel.filipe at gmail

Sep 10, 2004, 2:06 AM

Post #6 of 10 (3956 views)

Permalink

I would think that this is not a proper solution, but a work-around of
the problem no?

On Mon, 06 Sep 2004 17:57:44 -0500, dircha <dircha@dircha.com> wrote:
> Problem solved by user 'malloc' in the forums.
>
> Adding both pci=noapic,routeirq at boot allows the X startup probe to
> complete successfully.
>
> Works.
>
> --dircha
>
> --
> gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>

--
Miguel Sousa Filipe

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Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs *SOLVED* [ In reply to ]

dircha at dircha

Sep 11, 2004, 6:46 PM

Post #7 of 10 (3968 views)

Permalink

Miguel Filipe wrote:
> On Mon, 06 Sep 2004 17:57:44 -0500, dircha <dircha@dircha.com> wrote:
>>Problem solved by user 'malloc' in the forums.
>>
>>Adding both pci=noapic,routeirq at boot allows the X startup probe to
>>complete successfully.
>>
>>Works.
>
> I would think that this is not a proper solution, but a work-around
> of the problem no?

Very true.

After my initial enthusiasm, once I went to try to start using the
system, I discovered that X for it is completely unreliable and prone to
hanging; it is more or less unusable.

I've been too tied up with work related issues this week to find the
time to sit down and take a look at it again.

At one point I came across the changelog for the kernel patch that
introduced the routeirq option. It looks as though it was only
introduced recently to work around some known stability issues, although
this motherboard/chipset was not mentioned.

I haven't come across anyone reporting similar issues on the Asus board
using this same VIA chipset. And I have not yet found anyone else using
this Abit board, so as to attempt to confirm whether I got a hold of
some flaky hardware, or whether it is a known/common issue I am
encountering.

And the Radeon 9200 PCI is supposed to be well supported. Other PCI
cards in the system work just fine. The problem just seems to be
whatever arcane means Xorg is using to probe the PCI bus.

Tonight or tomorrow night I was meaning to try the latest 2.6.9 kernel
release candidate and the new Xorg release to see whether the problems
have already been resolved. I haven't fired up the system for a while,
so I'm not sure whether the new Xorg release is available for emerge.

--dircha

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Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs [ In reply to ]

dircha at dircha

Sep 12, 2004, 2:33 PM

Post #8 of 10 (3964 views)

Permalink

dircha wrote:
> And the Radeon 9200 PCI is supposed to be well supported. Other PCI
> cards in the system work just fine. The problem just seems to be
> whatever arcane means Xorg is using to probe the PCI bus.

I've found a few references to others using this board with Linux with
AGP video cards.

So what I'm going to do is buy a Radeon 9200 AGP instead of the PCI I have.

Will update in a few days.

--dircha

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Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs [ In reply to ]

dircha at dircha

Sep 13, 2004, 11:42 PM

Post #9 of 10 (3973 views)

Permalink

dircha wrote:
> dircha wrote:
>> And the Radeon 9200 PCI is supposed to be well supported. Other PCI
>> cards in the system work just fine. The problem just seems to be
>> whatever arcane means Xorg is using to probe the PCI bus.
>
> I've found a few references to others using this board with Linux
> with AGP video cards.
>
> So what I'm going to do is buy a Radeon 9200 AGP instead of the PCI I
> have.
>
> Will update in a few days.

I purchased a Radeon 9200 AGP card to use in place of the 9200 PCI.

Everything works great; it's stable.

I'm not sure whether this is a kernel problem, or an Xorg problem.

Where should this bug be reported?

--dircha

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Re: (abit) av8, x.org pci probe hangs [ In reply to ]

1i5t5.duncan at cox

Sep 16, 2004, 3:44 PM

Post #10 of 10 (3963 views)

Permalink

dircha posted <414692B8.3060600@dircha.com>, excerpted below, on Tue, 14
Sep 2004 01:42:00 -0500:

> dircha wrote:
>
> I purchased a Radeon 9200 AGP card to use in place of the 9200 PCI.
>
> Everything works great; it's stable.

Great! =:^)

> I'm not sure whether this is a kernel problem, or an Xorg problem.
>
> Where should this bug be reported?

I'd think it's an xorg problem, as xorg handles its own drivers and system
interface to a large extent. If you've read what Keith Packard said at
OLS, you'll know this is in fact one of the things they are hoping to
change, along with more modularity, starting with xorg 7 (or 6.9, as it
may be). X has for a long time handled most of its own hardware
interface, and one of the problems has been sometimes it and the kernel
get in each other's way. Smoothly moving part of this functionality out
of xorg to the host kernel system is one of the "front burner" goals of
xorg, but it'll take awhile.

One of these days I need to hook up a couple more monitors to my currently
unused PCI Radeon 7000 and see if it works with the AGP Radeon 9200SE,
now, or not..

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin

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