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DANI driver and high IRQs

Started by Criguada, 2010.01.08, 23:54:57

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Criguada

Hi all,
I have a BAD problem that is locking me out of OS/2 since about a month.

I recently had a 250Gb PATA drive installed in my box. To install it I
had to add a SATA/PATA PCI-E card to my motherboard, since it has only
one PATA channel onboard and it already is full (another HD and the
burner).

The card is well supported by DANI, but it is being mapped to share
IRQs with something else. Initially it was sharing IRQs with the USB
controller, which led to nearly immediate crashes and data corruption
whenever I attached USB peripherals.
Working at the BIOS level I was able to make it share IRQs with my
network card, which means I can work relatively safely until there's
no traffic on the network. If there's heavy traffic, I get crashes and
data corruption.

The point is that I cannot map it so that it doesn't share the IRQ,
simply because I have no more low IRQs left. Reading the DANI
documentation I see it SHOULD be possible to map the card to a high
IRQ, but after a LOT of tries I can say I am not able to: it always
stays low. I am now using mainly PCLinuxOS :-(

Is there anybody who can help out there? I found some messages on the
net about DANI and high IRQs, but it seems nobody was successful.

I have an AMD64X2 processor, and I am using ACPI 3.14 (I got crashes
with higher releases) in /SMP /APIC mode.

Thank you in advance!

Bye
Cris

Pete

Hi Cris

What mainboard chipset is involved? - The only system that I have nearly working perfectly with acpi v3.14 is nForce4 based and that requires the /TMR switch to avoid the odd silly glitch.

Another workaround may be to add the /!NOD switch - does not allow high IRQs (basically the same as using /PIC instead of /APIC).

While I think of it: Someone was asking about SATA cards in a newsgroup and wanted a recommendation. What card are you using?

Regards

Pete

David McKenna

Hi Chris,

  My guess is that this is an ACPI issue, not DANI - on my AMD based system the disk controller is IRQ21 with /SMP /APIC /TMR (most AMD need /TMR too - like Pete says). If you are using /SMP /APIC then it seems to me the add-on card should be using a high IRQ. What does the hardware manager say? Could you post the result of 'copy ACPICA$ acpi.log' ?

  One thing to try is put the second disk on the onboard PATA and the Burner on the card and see what happens. Also, what happens if you try to run /SMP /TMR (no APIC)?

Dave McKenna

Criguada

Hi all, thank you for your replies!
I will reply to your questions as soon as I have some free time to work at home.
BTW, would you please detail the reasons to apply /TMR? I tried the timer test program in the ACPI tools and never had problems with it, so I thought I had not the need to apply /TMR (Pete: what's "the odd silly glitch" you're referring to?).

Thank you
Bye
Cris

David McKenna

Cris,

  If the timer test program works without /TMR, then you are correct - it is not needed.

Dave McKenna

Pete

Hi Cris

The "the odd silly glitch" can be anything from USB drive access suddenly failing while in use to a complete system crash for no obvious reason ie no open apps on Desktop and system simply stops working.

I have 2 systems using nForce4 chipset and 1 using nForce430 chipset that the above applies to. On these systems running tmrtest.exe shows the /TMR switch is definitely required.

Regards

Pete

Andi

Different thought - PCI cards have to have the ability to share IRQs. AFAIK Danis driver and a lot of other drivers work with shared IRQs. Your findings seem to be different on this point.

Is it really true that Danis506 makes problems when the IRQ is shared?

Or is it the network/... driver which makes the troubles? I know the RTL8169 driver has similar problems on my system. Uniaud is another source of sudden crashes on my board. Have you narrowed down for sure, that danis driver is the source of the problem? Did you check the IRQs with pci.exe?

Another thought - IRQ lines for PCI (INT_A to INT_D) are shared between all PCI slots and all onboard components. Most often the only PCI slot which do not share the IRQ with others is the second one. But this depends on the board. This info should be in the manual. I think the IRQ thing is very similar with PCIe.

How do you try to set the IRQ for the SATA controller? What would happen if afterwards another driver (f.i. the LAN driver or ACPI) sets the IRQ for the line which is physically the same as for the SATA controller back to another value?

RobertM

Quote from: Andi on 2010.01.13, 14:33:03
Different thought - PCI cards have to have the ability to share IRQs. AFAIK Danis driver and a lot of other drivers work with shared IRQs. Your findings seem to be different on this point.

Is it really true that Danis506 makes problems when the IRQ is shared?

Or is it the network/... driver which makes the troubles?

It seems there are a few parameters that can cause problems...
(1) All drivers for devices using shared IRQs must properly support sharing an IRQ (and support it well)
(2) The hardware must be well designed to share an IRQ (some really cheapo stuff doesnt seem as capable in this area)
(3) OS/2 seems to make use of devices differently than Windows does, meaning using shared IRQs in OS/2 seems more problematic

-R


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Criguada

Hi Pete!

Quote from: Pete on 2010.01.09, 00:22:09
Hi Cris

What mainboard chipset is involved? - The only system that I have nearly working perfectly with acpi v3.14 is nForce4 based and that requires the /TMR switch to avoid the odd silly glitch.

The chipset is an NVIDIA NF-6100-405. My motherboard is an ASRock AM2NF6G-VSTA. As far as I can say, it does not need /TMR.

Quote from: Pete on 2010.01.09, 00:22:09
While I think of it: Someone was asking about SATA cards in a newsgroup and wanted a recommendation. What card are you using?

Regards

Pete


You can find it here:

http://www.lindy-usa.com/shop/showProductDetail.do?orderNumber=51125&source=search

Actually I bought it from Lindy Italy, but the product should be the same.

Bye
Cris

Criguada

#9
Hi David!

Quote from: David McKenna on 2010.01.09, 00:37:13
Hi Chris,

 My guess is that this is an ACPI issue, not DANI - on my AMD based system the disk controller is IRQ21 with /SMP /APIC /TMR (most AMD need /TMR too - like Pete says). If you are using /SMP /APIC then it seems to me the add-on card should be using a high IRQ. What does the hardware manager say? Could you post the result of 'copy ACPICA$ acpi.log' ?

David, unfortunately my memory didn't serve me well. :-(
I just booted eCS to verify my settings: I am using /SMP /APIC /!NOD /TMR. I am particularly shocked by the /TMR being there, since I clearly remember testing my system with tmrtest.exe. This is with eCS v1.2MR and ACPI 3.14. OTOH I see that my eCS v2 Silver boots with /SMP /APIC /!NOD and it has ACPI v3.17, so maybe more recent ACPI releases have fixed the timer behaviour on nVidia-based boxes... and maybe that's where I was succesfully testing with tmrtest.exe.

Anyway... I tried booting without /!NOD with no success. So I guess this is the problem, isn't it? Pete says /!NOD does not allow high IRQs.

I am attaching the output from ACPICA$, IBMS506$ (really DANIS506), RMVIEW /IRQ, and two screenshots of my hardware manager (top half and bottom half).

Is there something else I can try?

Bye
Cris

Criguada

Hi Andi!

Quote from: Andi on 2010.01.13, 14:33:03
Different thought - PCI cards have to have the ability to share IRQs. AFAIK Danis driver and a lot of other drivers work with shared IRQs. Your findings seem to be different on this point.

Is it really true that Danis506 makes problems when the IRQ is shared?
(...)

Andi, I would agree with you, since I have other cards that share IRQs without problems. My SCSI controller is happily sharing IRQ 10 with Uniaud.
But this one is different: it was first sharing IRQs with my USB controller, and as soon as I attached a USB peripheral the system would bomb. Then I managed to shuffle IRQs around so that it is now sharing with the network card; again, if I generate enough network traffic the system bombs.

I don't know who's guilty, but I could solve every issue if I could make it use another IRQ; and since all low IRQs are busy, I need to make it use a high IRQ.

Thank you!
Bye
Cris

Pete

Hi Cris

I saw a post recently in the ecs ngs that may be relevant to your problem.

The poster was having problems accessing PC-Card attached drive using danis506 v 1.8.5

They reported that backleveling to v1.8.4 solved the problem - indicating possible problems in v1.8.5

Presuming you have v1.8.5 installed maybe you want to try backleveling to see if that changes things - if using a build prior to v1.8.4 maybe you should try updating.

Regards

Pete

David McKenna

 Hi Cris,

I have many ideas... don't know if any will work though :-)

The first thing I would look at is the BASEDEV=DANIS506.ADD line in CONFIG.SYS. Does it have the /!BIOS switch? If not add it. If it does, remove it. Reboot and see if it helped...

It looks like IRQ15 is not being used - that would be ideal for your second ATA card. ACPI has a facility to direct IRQ's, but unfortunately it will not work as long as you are using /!NOD. (Sometimes it doesn't work anyway.) The other bad thing about /!NOD is when you get the ACPICA$ log, it does not show available links so there is no way to try to set them manually (through the ACPI.CFG file). Are you able to boot the machine with just a blank PSD=ACPI.PSD? If you can, do 'copy ACPICA$ acpi.log' and post that here - the one you have posted does not have the link information (because of /!NOD).

One thing I notice in the log you posted are some error messages. You might try adding /EIS to the ACPI.PSD to see if it helps...

  Do I understand correctly that you can not boot with /SMP /TMR? This would be the best to experiment with (if possible)...

Dave McKenna

Criguada

Hi Pete!

Quote from: Pete on 2010.01.14, 18:03:20
Hi Cris
I saw a post recently in the ecs ngs that may be relevant to your problem.
The poster was having problems accessing PC-Card attached drive using danis506 v 1.8.5
They reported that backleveling to v1.8.4 solved the problem - indicating possible problems in v1.8.5

Thank you Pete, this is very interesting!!
I am indeed using v1.8.5, so I'll try downgrading to 1.8.4. I hope v1.8.4 was already supporting JMicron controllers.

Bye
Cris

Criguada

Hi David!

Quote from: David McKenna on 2010.01.15, 04:04:51
Hi Cris,
I have many ideas... don't know if any will work though :-)
(...)

David, thank you very much. I'll try your ideas ASAP and will report back to you.

Bye
Cris