# Reports of problems

### hschmal@informatik.uni-rostock.de and SCSI-PCI-SC200

He reports that after plugging that card into his Pentium-board Linux does no longer boot. My first guess is that it is not supported.

### dmarples@comms.eee.strathclyde.ac.uk G/W 2000

Gateway 2000 G/W 2000 4DX2/66 PCI ATI-Graphics-Ultra-Pro IDE of indetermiate make

It works nice - only the IDE-Card runs in ISA-compatibility-mode, and works a lot faster when switched into PCI-Mode by a DOS-program... thus not that fast in Linux, patch would be nice.

### cip574@wpax01.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de (Frank Hofmann) / ASUS

he uses the ASUS-Board with 16MB-RAM, ISA-based S3/928, and the onboard-IDE-controller with a Seagate ST4550A harddisk, and had never any trouble with the newer Linux-kernels.

His problem is:

> `using X, my mouse is not responding the way I was used to before, it's sometimes behind movement and making jumps if moved fast. I think this was discussed In a Linux newsgroup before (I don't know wich one) and is due to the use of 16550 serial chips for the onboard serial interfaces. After two weeks, I got used to it :-)`

Reducing the threshold of the 16550 should help. There should be some patch to setserial available somewhere, but I do not know where.

### axel@avalanche.cs.tu-berlin.de (Axel Mahler) / ASUS

ASUS PCI/I-486SP3 Motherboard (Award BIOS 4.50), 16 MB RAM on-Board NCR Chip is disabled, he had the Genoa Phantom/W32 2MB for PCI and a Adaptec AHA-1542CF (BIOS v2.01) connected to:

- an IBM 1.05 GB Harddisk
- a Toshiba CD-ROM (XM4101-B)
- a HP DAT-Streamer (2GB)

when creating the filesystems mke2fs (0.4, v. 1.11.93) did hang and installing was impossible. After replacing the Genoa Phantom/W32 2MB PCI with an ELSA Winner 1000 2MB PCI it works perfectly. He tested it with an old Eizo VGA-ISA and it worked as well, so the problem was in the Genoa-PCI-card.

### Frank Strauss (strauss@dagoba.escape.de) / ASUS

ASUS SP3 Board i486DX2/66 NCR53c810 disabled Adaptec 1542B in ISA Slot with 2 Harddiskdrives (200MB Maxtor, 420MB Fijutsu), SyQuest 88MB and Tandberg Streamer ELSA Winner 1000 PCI, 1MB-VRAM Soundblaster Pro in ISA Slot at IRQ 5 Onboard IDE disabled Onboard serial, parallel, FD enabled

after a reset, the machine sometimes 'hangs' (soft and hard-reset the same) - this is probably not related to the Adaptec and the Soundcard, because even without these the system sometimes fails to come up. But if it runs, (and the ELSA-WINNER-1000-PCI-message appears) it runs ok.

the two serial ports are detected as 16550 as they should, but at some mailbox-sessions there was heavy data-loss at V42bis... The problem seems to be in the hardware...

CPU>-PCI-Burst seems to work well with DOS/MS-Windows

CPU->PCI-Burst does not work properly with linux0.99p15, Messing up when switching the virtual-consoles, crashing completely when calling big apps like ghostview, or xdvi, leaving the SCSI-LED on (!).

(I suspect these apps would be using a lot of CPU->PCI-burst because of the big heap of data to transmit to the PCI-Winner-1000)

After disabling CPU->PCI-Burst, it works well, the Winner-1000 at 1152x846 (not much fontcache with 1MB) does 93k xstones. OpaqueMove with twm is more than just endureable :-)

He has got a SATURN.EXE which he loads under DOS before starting Linux, helping to turn on burst without hangs...

Someone stated that these problems might go away when turning off "sync negotiation" on the Adaptec - I do not know if this is possible with the adaptec1542B too? But I guess so.

With CPU->PCI-Burst it yielded 95k xstones, so he considers it as not too grave to do without. His only problem is that he would like to run his Winner-1000 at 1152x900 which fails because it seems to take any x-resolution higher than 1024pixels as a 1280pixel-resolution, thus wasting a lot end resulting in a y-resolution of 816pixels... but this is probably no PCI-related problem. It should have gone away with XFree86-2.1

### egooch@mc.com / ASUS

- BOARD ASUS PCI/I-486 SP3 RAM: 16MB (4x4M-SIMM)
- CPU 486DX33 CPU
- BIOS Ver. 4.50 (12/30/93)
- Floppy Two floppy drives (1.2 and 1.44), using ASUS on-board floppy controller
- SCSI tried both WD7000 SCSI controller and Adaptec 1542CF and worked.
- Two SCSI 320M hard drives
- SCSI NEC84 CDROM drive
- SCSI QIC150 Archive tape drive
- Video Tseng ET4000 ISA graphics card
- Sound PAS16 sound card
- Printer attached to on-board ASUS parallel port

He has nothing in the PCI-Slots yet, but wants to buy a PCI-Video-Card, currently uses WD7000 SCSI controller but will switch to the NCR-Chip onboard as soon as the driver is out.

Everything works perfect - only the first serial port which has a 14.4K-Modem attached does hang occasianly after reconnecting with the modem after having used it previously. He says that would not be unique to ASUS but rather a bug in the SMC-LSI device with its 16550UART. The logitech-serial-mouse on the second port works fine. Setting down the threshhold of the 16550 for the mouseport would definitly help, one does seem to need a special patched setserial for that? I have not got the information yet, please contact me if you know more!

### Stefan.Dalibor@informatik.uni-erlangen.de / GigaByte

- Board GA-486iS from Gigabyte w/ 256Kb 2L-Cache, i486-DX2
- Bios AMI, 93/8
- SCSI no scsi-NCR-chip on-board, using Adaptec 1542C,
- Video ELSA Winner 1000
- Linux 0.99pl14 + SCSI-Clustering-Patches / Slackware 1.1.1

All seems to go well, but he has not tried neither networking, printing or a streamer yet. Before applying the Clustering- patches he had some problems with hangs triggered by "find", but this no longer is the case - perhaps it was an older kernel-bug.

The ELSA-Winner-1000 sometimes hangs. very strange patterns on the screen resolved only by booting... The dealer has told him it was a bug in the ELSA-Card, but the manufacturer claims it had solved the problem. The bug is not reproducable so he does not take any action at the moment.

All in all the machine seems to work very well using it a lot for textprocessing (emacs, LaTeX, xfig, ghostview). Interaction is surprisingly responsive, few difference from the 3 to 4-times as expensive sun he works on...

CPU->PCI-Burst is still disabled because the bios does not support the PCI-things well?

### Tom Drabenstott (tldraben@eos.ncsu.edu) with Comtrade / PCI48IX

PCI48IX Motherboard Rev. 1.0. Made by ??? documentation copyrighted by "TMC". The BIOS says not very much about PCI.

His E-315E Super IDE UMC (863+865) ISA-Controller-card does make trouble. (it is a multifunction controller-card). It seems to work well under DOS/OS2 but not under Linux.