# Freezes with an Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard

## gn0me

I am running gentoo on this machine with an Asus A7n8x deluxe revision 2.0 motherboard.  I have heard that nforce2 does have freezes with linux.  Its froze with every kernel ive tried.  It seems to freeze most of them when im emerging something.  Are there any known fixes for this?

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## _Nomad_

Not to worry... it can be fixed... there are a few different ways of going about though

1. Upgrade your BIOS to the latest revision. It has helped some, but done nothing for a few others... It's the "easiest" way though so give that a go first. 

2. Use a kernel that has the nforce2-disconnect-quirk patches included. That will stop your freezes as well. You can try for instance love-sources, which have these patches in most of the time. I'm not sure if it's invluded in mm but that might be worth a shot as well.

3. Disable everything that has to do with apic(note: NOT ACPI) in bios. if you're dualbooting windows, windows will not start with apic disabled so you'll have to enable that eveerytime you wan't to run it. (But that wont be to often right  :Laughing:  )

One of these should definitly work. Good luck

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## TheZog

I'm running one of these boards as well with great success.

That is to say only if I DON'T enable the ACPI kernel option.

If you do enable it you're sure to enter the "Land o'Lock-ups".

I've been running the development-source kernels since almost day one and it's not enable by default.

P.S.

Although I seem to be having some slight trouble with 2.6.6-rc2.

2.6.6-rc1 worked great though. Could just be a buggy bersion.

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## gringotts

TheZog: I have no problem with ACPI with my nVidia MB. Maybe you mean: 

# CONFIG_X86_UP_APIC is not set

About '2.6.6-rc2-love1' trouble, I miss bootsplash. <b>After</b> booting, ttys <b>does</b> show their splash as expected.

Also it seems I have some freeze time to time (have not related to anything up to now).

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## Lord_Firlionel

I got a 2.4.25-gentoo kernel. Where exactly are the acpi-options there? I made 'make menuconfig' but I honestly couldn't find anything concerning that.

But I disabled APIC in bios. The point is, that it still got these freezes.

Thanks for answers

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## TheTemplar

I've got the same problem as above but with a abit nf7-s v2. Since I am kind of inexperienced when tampering with kernel options I would like some help. I've tried using gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.5, also mm-sources 2.6.5 and I'm currently running gentoo-sources 2.4.25 since that is what I started out with (none of these helped).

The 2004.0 live-cd I have seem to be working quite ok with no crashes, is there any possiblity of using a kernel with the same options compiled for my computer?

 *_Nomad_ wrote:*   

> 
> 
> 2. Use a kernel that has the nforce2-disconnect-quirk patches included. That will stop your freezes as well. You can try for instance love-sources, which have these patches in most of the time. I'm not sure if it's invluded 
> 
> in mm but that might be worth a shot as well.
> ...

 

Like I said I've tried the mm sources but these love sources how do I get those, the don't seem to be in portage, or am I just blind? How do I make sure the nforce2-disconnect-quirk patch is included?

 *_Nomad_ wrote:*   

> 
> 
> 3. Disable everything that has to do with apic(note: NOT ACPI) in bios. if you're dualbooting windows, windows will not start with apic disabled so you'll have to enable that eveerytime you wan't to run it. (But that wont be to often right  )
> 
> 

 

I've tried disabling apic in the bios aswell as in the kernel, nothing helped.

Although this thread focuses on the nforce 2 chipset my mb also has the silicon image 3112a sata controller. I have seen people on the board having similar problems that they claim are related to the sata controller.

I found this thread where the user simply recompiled his kernel with the cd to get it to work:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=144212&highlight=sil+3112

Which seems a bit strange, it didn't work for me atleast. I have two maxtor 120Gb non-raided running in ide mode with windows on the master and linux on the slave.

I've lived with this bug now since I installed gentoo on my new machine and I'm growing a bit tired (especially since I lost a some school work last time it crashed). I tried installing suse just for fun and it didn't seem to crash although it was slow as hell...

Any clarifications / help are appreciated.

Also if there are any logs written in the system when it crashes please let me know where they are if you think they can help solve my problem. Like I said I've been using linux for 2-3 years but never been tampering with kernel etc. until I bought my new computer.

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## gringotts

 *Lord_Firlionel wrote:*   

> I got a 2.4.25-gentoo kernel. Where exactly are the acpi-options there?

 

Lord_Firlionel: ACPI is for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface and is found in "Power Management options" of 2.6 kernel config. Don't remember if they were in 2.4 config menu.

About the freezes: is your MB an A7N8X Deluxe? 

I had also a stability problem with a Debian 2.4.xx kernel: lowering the frequency of FSB was the only way to go. You can also lower the frequency of AGP.

I run now Gentoo 2.4 and 2.6 and the A7N8X is stable providing I do not enable APIC (not ACPI) -this option is for 2.6 only-. 

From some threads, I learned that BIOS should be updated to latest version. Will try it when I need a break.

Tip: you could also look for threads on "love-sources"  (kernel 2.6 only), some subjects discussed are about kernel stability.

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## gringotts

 *TheTemplar wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Like I said I've tried the mm sources but these love sources how do I get those, the don't seem to be in portage, or am I just blind? 
> 
> 

 

Do a search on "love-sources" in the forum, and look for the thread on the last build (now 2.6.6-rc2-love1). There is a link to an install guide in the signature of steel300.

Do not miss the love-sources.org site and the IRC channel on freenode.

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## Lord_Firlionel

The latest BIOS-update for A7N8X-Deluxe is from september. I compiled the 2.6.5-gentoo-kernel now, without APIC (or ACPI, whatever has an own section in menuconfig) and until now it seems to be stable. I'll drive some more testes when emerge sync is done.

But although I disabled APIC (or ACPI) for multi-processors (only section where it has a position), my 'dmesg' keeps on telling me, that local apic is activated. Is that bad for my stability?

Offtopic: I'm really surprised, that configuring and compiling a 2.6er kernel is that easy.

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## gringotts

 *Lord_Firlionel wrote:*   

> The latest BIOS-update for A7N8X-Deluxe is from september

 

following Asus support, should be numbered (C18D)1007

 *Quote:*   

> But although I disabled APIC (or ACPI) for multi-processors (only section where it has a position), my 'dmesg' keeps on telling me, that local apic is activated. Is that bad for my stability?

 

While looking my logs, I just made this discovery:

- 2.6.5-love5 was compiled with APIC (on 16 of april) and has been stable

- I tried 2.6.6-rc2-love1 with APIC on sunday, and it crashed immediately

 *Quote:*   

> Offtopic: I'm really surprised, that configuring and compiling a 2.6er kernel is that easy.

 

and funny

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## TheTemplar

I just compiled the gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.5 without APIC and it still crashed. I then tried compiling it without ACPI and after running a few "tests" (I unpacked the nwnresource tarball ~ 1.1 gig usually a sure killer of my system) everything seems stable. I won't declare it totally stable until I've used it for a week without lookups... hopefully it is ok though.

Btw I'm currently using the depricated OSS suport for sound in 2.6 is it hard to cross over to ALSA?

edit: also, thanks to those who answered my questions!

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## Lord_Firlionel

I'm actually using the aRts-Soundserver and the fitting plugin for XMMS. Honestly, I don't have a clue, if aRts bases on ALSA.

After emerging some tools, starting ooo several times and having 12 videos running at once, everything seemed to be stable. Actually I can listen to different sound-outputs at last, which comforts me very well.

I now just got some problems during bootup: When first booting the system, I have an Input/Output-Error on tty1 (and all the others, naturally). Logon with an user account is impossible. After pushing 'reset' (because shutdown -r now doesn't work during that time) everything's working quite normal. I think that this is a greet from my harddrives, but I'm not absolutely sure. Does anybody else experience such problems?

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