[gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[Jarry]

Hi gentoo-fans,

I recently bought a VIA K8M890 based mobo (asus a8v-vm) and tried
to install gentoo on it. To my big surprise, my two s-ata disks
have not been detected, so my installation finished very soon :-(
To my surprise, old backup p-ata drive has been detected,
as well as other peripherials attached to the southbridge VT8251
(network, on-board graphics, sound). I installed gentoo on that
old p-ata drive, recompilled kernel with whatever via/s-ata
options, but no help. Still s-ata drives not detected...

Board is definitelly good, I tried installing windows, and s-ata
disks have been correctly recognised. Seems only linux has somehow
problem. And this southbridge is nothing new, used at least one year
in various via-chipsets...

Does anybody have some experiences with s-ata disks attached to
via k8m880/890 (vt9251) and gentoo/linux? Or where could I find
some info about the latest status of linux <-> k8m880/890 support?

Jarry
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Re: [gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[Norberto Bensa]

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Jarry wrote:
> Does anybody have some experiences with s-ata disks attached to
> via k8m880/890 (vt9251) and gentoo/linux? Or where could I find
> some info about the latest status of linux <-> k8m880/890 support?
>

SATA VT8251 do not work on Linux. There are -very- experimental patches, but 
I've not tried them myself. Return the board and buy anything else that's not 
VIA based.

Regards,
Norberto


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Re: [gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[Jarry]

Norberto Bensa wrote:


> SATA VT8251 do not work on Linux. There are -very- experimental patches, but 
> I've not tried them myself. Return the board and buy anything else that's not 
> VIA based.

I did. Bought nForce4-based board. Got stuck with sata-II drives
(lock-ups, crushes, out-of-sync, both in linux and in windows).
It is a buggy chipset, has problems with nearly all sata-II drives
(tried Seagate and Samsung) and nvidia does not care a sh*t...

Jarry

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nForce chipsets (was: Re: [gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?)

[Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.]

On Saturday 25 March 2006 15:59, Jarry <jarry@gmx.net> wrote about 'Re: 
[gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?':
> Norberto Bensa wrote:
> I did. Bought nForce4-based board. Got stuck with sata-II drives
> (lock-ups, crushes, out-of-sync, both in linux and in windows).
> It is a buggy chipset, has problems with nearly all sata-II drives
> (tried Seagate and Samsung) and nvidia does not care a sh*t...

Odd, my nforce4 board has not encountered any issues since I bought it last 
year.  It successfully drives my WD Raptors and SATA CD/DVD-RW.

I've not been using dmraid, although the board is supposedly supported.

Although, I do have to say that I prefer my Areca 1160 -- Battery backed-up 
cache so I can enable write caching, and real hw raid.  It drives my 5 
Hitachi 7K500s -- though the Hitachi actually ship with SATA-II disabled 
because they had issues with poor controller support and I have not used a 
real-mode OS to set them to use SATA-II, yet.  (They are freakin' fast as 
is.)

I occurs to me that perhaps the Raptors are also only using SATA-I, as 
well, I really don't know how to check that.

-- 
"If there's one thing we've established over the years,
it's that the vast majority of our users don't have the slightest
clue what's best for them in terms of package stability."
-- Gentoo Developer Ciaran McCreesh
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Re: nForce chipsets (was: Re: [gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?)

[Mike Williams]

On Saturday 25 March 2006 22:26, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> I occurs to me that perhaps the Raptors are also only using SATA-I, as
> well, I really don't know how to check that.

They are.
WD don't consider SATA-II controllers good enough yet for the Raptors.
Plus no drive can max out a SATA-I bus yet, so why bother?

-- 
Mike Williams
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Re: [gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[Jim]

* on the Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 10:59:05PM +0100, Jarry said:
> Norberto Bensa wrote:
> 
> 
> >SATA VT8251 do not work on Linux. There are -very- experimental patches, 
> >but I've not tried them myself. Return the board and buy anything else 
> >that's not VIA based.
> 
> I did. Bought nForce4-based board. Got stuck with sata-II drives
> (lock-ups, crushes, out-of-sync, both in linux and in windows).
> It is a buggy chipset, has problems with nearly all sata-II drives
> (tried Seagate and Samsung) and nvidia does not care a sh*t...
> 
> Jarry

I have an ASRock 939NF4G-SATA2 nForce4 based motherboard.  I put a WDC
WD1600JS-22M SATA II hard drive in the system.  Everything has been
workinging perfectly.  The drive is very fast and everything onboard
works.  The system has been very stable.

The only issue I had with the board was that I couldn't get alsa to
work.  So I was stuck with NVidia's OSS based nvsound.  nvsound does
hardware mixing, though a lot of newer programs want alsa.  So I
recompiled everything to do oss.  Today I found a simple fix to get the
onboard audio to work by adding the ID to an alsa driver and recompile.
Now alsa is up and running.

I have had nothing but headaches with VIA and ALi in the past.

This ASRock board is a great value at < $75.
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Re: nForce chipsets (was: Re: [gentoo-user] VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?)

[Jarry]

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:

> Odd, my nforce4 board has not encountered any issues since I bought it last 
> year.  It successfully drives my WD Raptors and SATA CD/DVD-RW.

AFAIK, nForce4 does not have any problem with sata-I disks. And out of
sata-II, WD are the only drives which work without problem (I did not
know it before, just now I have read a few forums and mailing lists,
full of complaints about sata-II & nForce4). But with all other sata-II
disks (Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung) nForce4 has really problems.
Sometimes switching the drive to sata-I mode helps, sometimes not.
But if you have WD, you are lucky...

One more thing: the latest revision of nForce4 (which can be found
on latest and rather expensive boards) has fixed it. Unfortunatelly,
one can not know which chipset revision is used on a certain mobo,
until you buy it, dismount cooler, and check chipset...

Jarry
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[gentoo-user] Re: VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[Sven Köhler]

> Does anybody have some experiences with s-ata disks attached to
> via k8m880/890 (vt9251) and gentoo/linux? Or where could I find
> some info about the latest status of linux <-> k8m880/890 support?

Googling revealed, that the SATA-ports in the VT8251 _should_ be
AHCI-compliant and therefor supported by Linux.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[Jarry]

Sven Köhler wrote:

> Googling revealed, that the SATA-ports in the VT8251 _should_ be
> AHCI-compliant and therefor supported by Linux.

vt8251 *is* ahci-compliant, and in bios there is option to set
up sata controller as ide, or ahci. But no matter what you set,
vt8251/sata is not recognised with standard 2.6.15 kernel...

But there is unofficial patch/mod for ahci.c, and right now
I'm testing it. BTW, I have read on via forum that kernel-dev's
refused to include this patch in official kernel tree, because
there is something peculiar about it (some fix they do not like).
BTW, it's made by via and modified by some developers...

Jarry
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[gentoo-user] Re: VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[Sven Köhler]

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>> Googling revealed, that the SATA-ports in the VT8251 _should_ be
>> AHCI-compliant and therefor supported by Linux.
> 
> vt8251 *is* ahci-compliant, and in bios there is option to set
> up sata controller as ide, or ahci. But no matter what you set,
> vt8251/sata is not recognised with standard 2.6.15 kernel...
> 
> But there is unofficial patch/mod for ahci.c, and right now
> I'm testing it. BTW, I have read on via forum that kernel-dev's
> refused to include this patch in official kernel tree, because
> there is something peculiar about it (some fix they do not like).
> BTW, it's made by via and modified by some developers...

IMHO, the patch should only include the PCI-Id or something like that -
well, but the patch doesn't seem to be as simple as that.

Do you have a link to the patch? or even a link to the discussion in the
 LKML?

Thanks
  Sven


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[gentoo-user] Re: VIA K8M890/K8M880 (VT8251) supported?

[Jarry]

Sven Köhler wrote:

> IMHO, the patch should only include the PCI-Id or something like that -
> well, but the patch doesn't seem to be as simple as that.
> Do you have a link to the patch? or even a link to the discussion in the
> LKML?

The patched ahci.c is for example here:
http://grivell.home.comcast.net/ahci.c
Someone with nick "CodeRedLin" modified ahci.c with via patch...

Instead of standard ahci.c which comes with 2.6.15-gentoo-r7 sources
I used this modified one, and it really works! Suddenly both my sata
drives are detected. hdparm -t /dev/sda (sdb) gives me very nice
65 MB/s, and that is while I'm doing raid1-resync!

But he (author) says this patched ahci.c will probably not work
with 2.6.16 :-(

There is another patch for sata_via.c :
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/paulrbarber/sata_via_20060221.c
I did not test it, as that modified ahci.c worked for me.
BTW, I'm not sure what is better to use: ahci.c, or sata_via.c?

I have found a very good discussion about vt8521 & linux here:
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=68455&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear
(all in one line)

Jarry

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