# Why are linux file systems unstable on ALi M15x5 chipset?

## mcoulman

Gateway M500S 

Chipset

Ali 1671/1535+ System Chipset

400MHz Processor Side Bus (PSB)

PCI Bus V2.2

BIOS

Phoenix® NoteBIOS

512 KB flash ROM

SMBIOS (DMI) 2.3 Support

Full ACPI Support

System Management

ACPI V1.0B Power Management Support

Wake-On-LAN

WfM V2.0

I've tried both Reiser and ext3, (running on a variety of kernels including the ac-sources, and a variety of boot flags tweaking the acpi and/or pci settings) and time after time I end up with a corrupted file system. Most of the time I can ressurect the file system doing a --rebuild-tree from Knoppix, but that doesn't address the source of the problem.

Initial partitioning from NTFS to ext2 (/boot), swap, and reiserfs (/[root]) was done with Partion Magic 8 following the steps in a How-To I found on the forums.

When I run 'PC Doctor' disk diagnostics from XP everything is fine. Everything works great from XP.

Anybody have a clue or pointer?

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## pmjdebruijn

I've got a gigabyte motherboard with the same chipset, the entire system runs fine!

Did you enable Ali support in your kernel? Also you could try turning of DMA support with hdparm...

Bye,

DrZ

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## mcoulman

ALi chipset support is on in the kernel. Turning off DMA on a UDMA5 disk running UDMA2 doesn't seem like a viable solution. except to troubleshoot the problem.

Thanks for the reply.

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## pmjdebruijn

Tried to check (and relax) your memory timing settings in the BIOS... maybe the chipset isn't te problem, but your memory is?

Tried MemTest86?

Though the weird thing is that if the memory was the problem Windows should also be unstable.

I have heard that Windows is more forgiving on bad memory than Linux... So I would run MemTest86 non-the-less....

Bye,

DrZ

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## mcoulman

MemTest - 2 complete passes, no errors, and no errors from "PC Doctor" memory diagnostics in XP either. I have not tried to change timings yet...

I don't see an option on setting timings in the bios, so that avenue seems to be a dead end.

I booted gentoo & captured dmesg. Here is one item that raises an eyebrow:

```
ALI15X3: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:10.0

PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt pin A of device 00:10.0
```

I've tried pci=noacpi,biosirq separately & together, no help.

later

```

usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1

PCI: 00:0d.2 PCI cache line size set incorrectly (32 bytes) by BIOS/FW.

PCI: 00:0d.2 PCI cache line size corrected to 128.
```

What if the bois is right, as demonstrated by the stability of XP and the instability of linux fs?

and later

```
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A

Redundant entry in serial pci_table.  Please send the output of

lspci -vv, this message (10b9,5457,17c0,1068)

and the manufacturer and name of serial board or modem board

to serial-pci-info@lists.sourceforge.net.

register_serial(): autoconfig failed

```

To me, without much knowledge of the kernel WRT hardware, it seems that the ACPI and/or PCI drivers used by the kernel can't handle this hardware.

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## UberLord

I don't think it's the chipset.

I'm running an ALi 15x3 in my Presario 2100 and I've had zero hard drive problems with any OS.

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## beejay

Had the same chipset on my old MB. Never had any problems. Well, the Northbridge was a bit bitchy - I couldn't watch TV in Overlay-Mode (nvidia + glx + v4l = System-Freeze).

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## pmjdebruijn

beejay, the agp thingy is a known problem, and should also be on windows. Somewhere I read that setting (forcing) agp to 1x or 2x should help!

Kind Regards,

DrZ

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## ValKov

mcoulman wrote:

 *Quote:*   

> Initial partitioning from NTFS to ext2 (/boot), swap, and reiserfs (/[root]) was done with Partion Magic 8 following the steps in a How-To I found on the forums.

 

I used Acronis OS Selector for creating partitions and filesystems, and I had problems with filesystems. Now I use Acronis for creating partitions and Gentoo tools for creating filesystems and it seems like I have no problems any more.

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## mcoulman

To add a little closure to the thread: After being very busy in my personal life for a while, I returned to the attempt to get Gentoo up on the Gateway M500S laptop. 2.4.x kernels never did work (buggy ACPI & ALiM15x3 support) but 2.6.0-mm kernels seem to work.

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