neutro

Well it works, in the sense that my previous line also works ;)

I mean by that : the ide controllers are switched correctly, and even if I don't specify the irq in the append line, they are found correctly and set the same way as with the Mandrake kernel. I can access my HD on hda and my drives on hde and hdf alright.

The problem is that in my Mandrake kernel, it seems that eth0 and usb is on the same interrupt as ide0:

  0:    1117892          XT-PIC  timer

  1:      45798          XT-PIC  keyboard

  2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade

  5:  457191          XT-PIC  ide0, usb-uhci, usb-uhci, usb-uhci, eth0

  8:          1          XT-PIC  rtc

  9:          0          XT-PIC  CMI8738-MC6

11:    1034790          XT-PIC  EMU10K1, nvidia

14:        149          XT-PIC  ide2

When I boot with the append line specifying ide0=... and ide2=..., my USB mouse is lost (though the usbmouse driver is loaded, but I can see that uhci couldn't be set up in /var/log/dmesg), and incidentally, the network interface is also not brought up. So I guess there's an IRQ conflict of some sort here. I tried all compinations of acpi=off and noapic without success.

If I don't include the ide0=... ide2=... parameters, I get a kernel panic since my disk is now on hde and I have root=/dev/hda1. If I place root=/dev/hde1, lilo complains that this is impossible since when running lilo, hde doesn't exist (my disk is on hda then).

Also, I don't understand the information in /proc/ioports... Lines pertaining to ide configuration are:

01f0-01f7 : ide2

(...)

03f6-03f6 : ide2

(...)

9800-980f : VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586B PIPC Bus Master IDE

  9800-9807 : ide2

  9808-980f : ide3

(...)

b000-b03f : Promise Technology, Inc. 20265

  b000-b007 : ide0

  b008-b00f : ide1

(...)

d000-d003 : Promise Technology, Inc. 20265

  d002-d002 : ide0

d400-d407 : Promise Technology, Inc. 20265

  d400-d407 : ide0

Thus I get sort of conflicting information... the adresses that work are:

ide0=0xd400,0xd002

ide2=0x1f0,0x3f6

and as I said before it doesn't matter if I specify IRQ's or not.

Thank you again for your input, but it seems that for now I'll just have to enjoy my Mandrake kernel ;)

BTW I was able to boot in 2.6.3, just without mouse and network. I didn't do much but I managed to freeze Firefox just using the arrows for scrolling ;) FYI I have a bug with the nvidia driver and I was just seeing if it would just go away by using a non-MDK kernel. It doesn't seem so. So at least I have my answer.

That was a good idea, thanks -- but alas, it didn't work.

As for the config file, if there is in fact an option for this, I must know it! But just browsing it is tiresome. Maybe later...

Here's the problem: I have an Asus A7V-266 with two IDE ATA-100 controlers: one by VIA and the other by Promise, each of which have two channels (i.e. a total of 8 possible devices).

When using Mandrake kernels, my hard drive is detected on ide0, as /dev/hda. hdb, hdc and hdd are empty. On my second controler, I have my CD recoreder and DVD drive on ide2 (hde and hdf), hdg and hdh being empty.

I'm currently trying to compile another kernel (2.6.3) from the kernel.org source and a friend's .config. When I boot without anything special in the append= LILO line, the two controllers seem inverted: my HD is detected on ide2 at /dev/hde, and my drives on ide0 at hda and hdb. Of course since lilo.conf specify root=/dev/hda1, I get a kernel panic.

Now I'd like not changing my fstab so that I could boot on any kernel without messing around in it or fearing that LILO won't find the boot partition. So I tried giving an append= option of the form ide0= and ide2=.

So what to put there? I have two conflicting informations from /var/log/dmesg when I boot a Mandrake kernel. First I have:

PDC20265: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode.

    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xb000-0xb007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA

    ide1: BM-DMA at 0xb008-0xb00f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio

(...)

VP_IDE: VIA vt8233 (rev 00) IDE UDMA100 controller on pci00:11.1

    ide2: BM-DMA at 0x9800-0x9807, BIOS settings: hde:DMA, hdf:DMA

    ide3: BM-DMA at 0x9808-0x980f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio

But putting ide0=0xb00 ide1=0xb008 ide2=0x9800 ide3=0x9808 didn't work: the kernel was probing ide4 and ide5 for hdi, hdj, hdk, hdl...

Later in dmesg I get:

ide0 at 0xd400-0xd407,0xd002 on irq 5

ide2 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14

which as I said before contradicts the previous information. However, putting ide0=0xd400,0xd002 ide1=0x1f0,0x3f6 seems to work. The only problem is that I also have usb and eth0 on irq5, and it seems that doing this prevents the network interface to be brought up: it says that adress 127.0.0.1 is already taken by another host!

So: anyone know a better way of performing the ide controler switch?

I'm an avid Q3 player.

I'm solely on Linux right now, but never noticed much difference in terms of speed.

Well you said you fiddled with all mixers in alsamixer...

Did you unmute the Analog/Digital Output Jack?

It's the second-to-last one for my card (SB Live! 5.1).

I had to turn it off since I don't have digital speakers and it only spitted static through the center speaker by default...

I guess if your headphones work, that's a good start -- I mean, alsa works!

XFree86 4.3? It is ready ;)

But no, I don't think Y, or Berlin/Fresca, or anything else is ready for use.

That is interesting. This is the first time I built a kernel (yes newb here).

I got the source package for 2.4.21-0.27mdk and edited the .config file. Admittedly the kernel would not boot if I chose "Ahtlon" as for my processor (I kept 586). The only things I changed in .config was, if I remember correctly, ext3 support in the kernel instead of as a module, turning off ISA and ISA PnP support and disabling ACPI.

All the modules were built all right, and the nvidia driver too, without editing the makefiles. The kernel by default is called 2.4.21-0.27mdkcustom and since this is the output of uname -r, the nvidia driver was installed there....

Maybe you're talking about something else?

Well as I said I'm a newb with respect to kernel compilation, I just wanted to try it for the first time. In my update urpmi source, I only saw the source package, not the binary kernel, so I decided "what the hell" and compiled it.

Ah yes of course ;)

But I rebooted for other reasons also.

I tried the most recent Mandrake 9.1 kernel (2.4.21-0.27mdk) with only minor modifications of .config (processor type, ext3 compiled in the kernel, etc.) and there's no change in the behavior...

I noticed the release candidates for 4.4. disappeared for me, from the servers I use for urpmi. Is this the reason?

Yes. See those two Slashdot articles for more details:

Mandrake blocked by XFree86 4.4 license

XFree86 4.4: list of rejecting distributors grows

I'm not sure what it is you're suggesting exactly...

I just rebooted using "nv" instead of "nvidia" as for my videodriver; of course I can't test stability in quake3 and ut2004demo with nv, but the reproducible bug in Firefox just doesn't happen when using nv, online or not.

Also, I may have forgotten to post the result of other tests, but the Firefox freeze is repeatable even without network running, even without the via-rhine driver, and even without the network card.

So it seems that the nvidia driver is solely responsible for the problems I have. I don't have these under Windows: does that mean that hardware faults are ruled out? Maybe not... I have yet to try with another videocard. But considering the bug is there in every nvidia driver I tried since 2xxx, the odds of suddendly finding a release which works are slim.

My post on nvnews is already almost on the second page without reply, so it will likely be ignored. Anyone had success writint go linux-bugs -at- nvidia.com? I guess I'll try.

Well it comes with KDE 3.2, which is I heard here and elsewhere quite fast and generally well done. However, because of the licensing problems with the XF86 team, I think XFree 4.4 won't be shipped with MDK 10 after all.

Again for the record... My bug is caused by the nvidia driver. Using nv, Firefox is unfreezable.

I posted yet another lengthy description at nvnews but I don't really expect much. Sigh.

The few first time I tried ALSA with my SB Live! 5.1 and 5.1 system, I tought it didn't work too. I only heard static on the center speaker.

Then I discovered alsamixer :)

Type alsamixer and see if the various channels are configured correctly. In my case, the master was at 0 (muted) and the last channel, digital 5.1, was on. I don't have a digital speaker system, and digital is sent through... center speaker channel. Thus, the static.

Can't you make it so that if a particular kernel is booted, then the associated nvidia driver is loaded? I mean, suppose that you already have compiled the nvidia driver for each of your kernels... And suppose you installed the driver for each of your kernel, aren't they stored in /lib/modules/kernelname?

I tried removing my network card altogether since the net-pf-10 module was mentioned in /var/log/messages upon Firefox freezing, and upon realizing that every freeze I got was when I was online. Firefox still freezes.

However I'm not sure if the ethernet card driver (via-rhine in my case) was still loaded even if the network card wasn't plugged in. Is there a way I could unload the module completely? I see the rmmod command; how does one use it? Would it be possible for me to just stop the network, unload the ethernet card driver, do my test, and afterwards reload the driver and bring the network back up?

aeroe: can you describe what kind of freeze or crash you're experiencing, along with your hardware and software vital stats? We're kind of trying if everyone in this thread has the same problem or not.

It doesn't seem so: there's the nForce-related bug, and then there's mine ;)

I can't help you there.

For my part, I have collected detailed straces of Mozilla, Firefox and ut2004demo during one of my freezes. However they do not show anything directly indicative of the problem, and somehow I doubt the developers have time to look at this.

This really is frustrating. If I knew the problem, were it be hardware or software, I would so fix it right now...

If you're sure you replace the exact same package, just do

rpm -ivh --force

Or just to be sure not erasing a newer package with an older one,

rpm -ivh --replacefiles --replacepkgs

You may also check out the rpmfix.sh script from this thread.

Here's the deal. Since I applied an update for many KDE components, including Konqueror, for Mandrake 9.1 (I'm using KDE 3.1.0, i.e. kdebase3.1-83.5mdk), I can't connect to sftp servers anymore.

Upon entering an url of the form sftp://username@servername, Konqueror asks for the password and idles; after a while, I get the following error:

An error occured while loading sftp://username@servername:

Could not connect to host localhost

It worked well before updating, and it is to be noted that I can connect to ssh servers using url's of the form fish://username@servername, so that ssh connexion itself doesn't seem to be the problem.

If anyone has a hint as to what happened and what I need to do to make it work, I'd be gratefull...

Hardware:

- Athlon XP 1800+

- 512 MB DDR SDRAM

- Asus A7V266-E mobo

- GF2 MX400 64MB

Nature of crash:

- sometimes in Mozilla, reproducible while scrolling in the options of Firefox

- in Q3 and ut2004demo, while playing online

- video freezes, audio loops

- mouse pointer can still move; interface does not respond

- restarting X doesn't work through alt-backspace

- changing VC's doesn't work throug ctrl-alt-Fn

- X uses 98% of CPU in background (as per top ran in batch mode)

- only kernel keys combos work (e.g. alt-sysreq-K)

Note:

When a freeze in Firefox happens, I get the following error in /var/log/messages:

kernel: request_module[net-pf-10]: fork failed, errno 1

I changed /etc/modules.conf so that I now have the line

alias net-pf-10 off

but it didn't do anything (I continue to have the net-pf-10 error). Freezes with other apps than Firefox don't log any error in /var/log/messages.

Sorry to ressuscitate that thread B)

However, for the record, I got a workaround. In lilo.conf, I pass the options hdg=none hdh=none in the append line. IRQ probing is not attempted anymore and now Mandrake boots *really* fast.

He he welcome in the club. Is it crashing only while using Firefox? If so then the obvious answer would be not using Firefox ;)

As I said before, I'm not sure we're even talking about the same problem. For example, in my freezes, I see my mouse pointer fine and I can actually move it around. However I can't:

- Click on anything (user interface is frozen)

- Restart X with ctrl-alt-backspace

- Change virtual consoles with ctrl-alt-Fn

What works for me is using kernel key sequences (alt-sysrq-key). With the latest (5336) nVidia drivers I usually am able to get out of a freeze with minimal damage by doing alt-sysreq-K, which kills the current console (kdm then restarts X in the next virtual console available).

Am I wrong if I say that everyone with such a freeze problem have

- a nVidia card

- a AMD cpu?

Well thanks, it worked well with no side effects so far.

Geez, I wass missing /usr/bin/passwd :o

Well I'm currently running the line to see if I am actually missing files ;)

This script would have been useful last time my system borked and mistakingly pressed "Y" when fsck asked me to check filesystem integrity (thus bypassing ext3 journal recovery). I lost lots of files and replaced by hand quite a few rpms. Once in a while I still find that some program that I haven't used since is broken, and I have to reinstall it.

Are you aware of any risk in using your script? (e.g. overwriting config files or nasty side-effects such as this?)

I guess the procedure would be to go in

Preferences -> Navigator -> Helper Applications

Click "new type" (unless .ram files are already there, in which case you should select it and click "edit" instead). Enter "x-real" as for the mimetype, and ".ram" as for the extension"

and select the "open with" option with /usr/bin/mplayer for the application.

This should work (I didn't test it -- on my system, as it was proposed in another thread, I installed the Realplayer plug-in so that .ram files are opened by realplay instead).

As for stuttering of quicktime movies, that may be a lot of things. CPU, ram, connection, file corruption, etc. In my experience .mov files always play fine in mplayer with the latest win32 codec package from PLF (I currently use win32-codecs-1.4-2plf).