My troubles installing LINUX

[Mike Bilow]

The Supermicro P6DLS is a rather eccentric motherboard, to say the least.
It has a few, well, "quirks," especially when it gets too near the Linux
Adaptec drivers.

First of all, running the bus at 75 MHz may well cause trouble.  I have
never tried this, but it would be one of the first things I would look at.

Second, the most likely source of trouble on the P6DLS is -- get this --
PCI card plug order.  Some of the PCI slots have different capabilities
from each other, so often rearranging the cards will solve mysterious
problems, especially with video.  Often, if you are using a PCI video
card, it helps to put it into either the slot closest to or futhest from
the power supply.  Both bus mastering and resource allocation order will
be changed.  When you see funny video things on the P6DLS, PCI card order
is the leading suspect.  We once had a Number Nine PCI video card that
would only work in one slot if there was a 3C905 Ethernet card present.

Third, you absolutely must make sure that your Linux kernel is compiled
with IO-APIC support or this motherboard is not going to work.  You should
test by booting Linux with SMP disabled to see if you have any different
behavior; do this by specifying "nosmp" to Lilo when prompted. 

-- Mike


On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, Randall Hofland wrote:

> FYI Update on LINUX installs;
> 
>     I was able to fully install Mandrake 7 to the hard drive of my
> server box (Supermicro P6DLS boards with dual Celeron @ 525 MHz, 128 Mb
> DIMMs CAS L2) and then exit the install and reboot. The machine freezes
> with a screen that is blank except for a "g" at the bottom left. I have
> not been able to configure X because of issues with using an old PS2 VGA
> monitor despite setting the X configurations within the acceptable range
> (but I don't really need X on the server anyways). Unlike my install
> issues with SuSE where it usually does not get through LILO, this freeze
> is beyond the LILO boot.
>     I am now suspecting a hardware issue on the motherboards but can't
> figure out what can be the problem. The SCSI drive is properly
> configured as a boot device in Bios and the Adaptec drivers for the on
> board UW-SCSI seem to boot up via the BIOS installation as well. I have
> not discovered any obvious points of contention during my explorations
> of the BIOS and SCSI utilities. My only real concern is that either my
> running the bus at 75 rather than 66 MHz causes some data errors
> (unlikely since I have have already tried loading SuSE at the 66MHz
> setting) or that the DIMMs have some sort of configuration problem (BIOS
> is set to autodetect but I have also tried manually setting to CAS L2 or
> L3).The one thing I have not done with this board (but did with another
> problem child) was to update the BIOS to detect faster CPU speeds.
>     This is truely making me crazy. Please give me some idea what I need
> to look for.
> 
> Thanks!


-
Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with
"subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the
message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).