Known issues with nForce4-4x chipset and recent kernels?

[Matthias Saou]

Hi,

I've just tried to update the hardware I had in a machine, updating at the
same time the system from FC3 to FC5/dev. What I did was prepare an FC5
installation on the final hard drive, but in a temporary machine, then
planned on simply fixing up the initrd for the final one and putting the
disk in. But it wasn't that easy...

Once I got the final machine ready, a Sempron 2800+ on an Asus K8N4-E
Deluxe motherboard (pretty neat and not too expensive), which is based on
an nForce4-4x chipset, I could boot fine off the old parallel ata drive
with FC3 in single user mode, then even mount the new serial ata drive
which was recognized fine.

I thought it would be a piece of cake from here, since I just added the
sata_nv to the initrd and rebooted...

But it turns out, after fighting for a long while thinking it was an
initrd problem, that even the FC5 installation booted from DVD doesn't see
the serial ata drive, although it loads the sata_nv module. After loading
the module, nothing special in dmesg apart from some selinux related
stuff.

After hours of fiddling, trying to add a sleep delay after the sata_nv
modprobe in the inirtd (I saw a post somewhere about a race condition at
some point), I simply gave up. I brought a newer parallel ata to put into
the machine, and booting for the even older one where FC3 is installed, I
managed to copy over the install from the serial ata drive to the new
parallel ata one. BUT...

To my great surprise, I got into a very similar situation, where the
kernel wouldn't boot. Hmmm. So I tried once more simply starting an FC5
installation from the DVD, and same thing, when the kernel displays "hda:"
and seems to be trying to read the partition layout to display "hda1
hda2", I get messages about DMA timeouts.

Note that at that point, simply switching the boot device in the BIOS to
the old parallel ata drive and booting FC3, I can mount all three drives
and they work perfectly. So it doesn't seem to be a cabling problem or a
BIOS problem.

The only explanation I currently have is that 2.6.15 and 2.6.16 kernels
have a problem with this motherboard, as I've tried both the original FC5
kernel and the latest one from FC5 testing updates.

I've also tried the "noprobe" install option, booting with "noapic", but
I've run out of ideas....

Does anyone know about any issues with nForce4-4x chipsets currently? I've
been searching google for hours and found nothing at all.

Matthias

-- 
Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages : http://freshrpms.net/
Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) - Linux kernel 2.6.16-1.2069_FC5
Load : 0.87 0.66 0.36