# bastler's x-mas mess: A7N8X and new kernel 2.6.0

## der bastler

Basic hardware configuration:

Athlon 2500+ Barton

ASUS A7N8X Deluxe

2x256MB DDR400-RAM

ASUS V7700 Deluxe

I was annoyed with the current nforce2 soundstorm support in Linux. Due to the lack of a hardware mixer one is only able to hear one sound source at a time. This is ridiculus, compared with Windows (and I'm in competition with a friend who thinks XP is the best OS today  :Rolling Eyes: ).

There was a Soundblaster Live Player 1024 left behind after the death of my old mainboard, so why not use it? And btw, a good reason to switch to the new kernel 2.6.0.

Ok, 2.4.22-ac was running rock-solid, never change a running system; but hey, got x-mas holiday...   :Cool: 

Emerged gentoo-dev-sources, made menuconfig by adjusting my old 2.4 config, excluded nforce sound, included Emu10K1, built kernel, re-emerged nvidia-kernel, emerged alsa-lib and -utils, edited /etc/modules.d/alsa, added ALSA to default runlevel, did modules-update, changed /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 to load usb modules in right order (important for USB2.0), did reboot...

...System's running, smooth, fast, small (40MB memory usage idling on Xfce4 Desktop). So far, so good.

Started MozillaFirebird --ok.

Started Xmms, played music --ok.

Eterm opended, tried an "aplay" as a mixer test --SYSTEM FREEZE!

Huh, what the...? System was locked, only chance: hard reboot   :Confused: 

After reboot: tried Enigma --SYSTEM FREEZE! => Hard reboot   :Confused: 

After reboot: Xfce4 panel was empty! Firebird's bookmarks: gone!   :Embarassed: 

Several new menuconfigs and re-compiles and a longer -stable- run of Enemy Territory later I decided that these freezes were caused by some sort of miss-configuration.

I thought wrong, the next freeze came with opening Firebird --and I switched back to 2.4.22. It's running stable since then and ALSA is functioning perfectly.

I don't know what caused the freezes, because everything was functioning. Soundcard, graphics card, TV tuner (Hauppauge WinTV PCI/FM), NIC (I use the on-board 3com adapter), even the sensors could be read by gkrellm!

Perhaps devfs interfered? Gentoo needs devfs (there's a warning message at boot time when you don't include devfs in the kernel), but devfs is stripped down in 2.6.0. I wonder how this is solved when 2.6.0 is accepted in the gentoo sources...

Am I the only one with 2.6-problems on an A7N8X?

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## Wedge_

I have the same board, and I've been running 2.5/2.6 for several months without any big problems. I'm in the same situation as you with sound support - I can't cope without hardware mixing, so I'm still using my trusty old Santa Cruz card instead. 

One thing that may have caused your problems is this: "made menuconfig by adjusting my old 2.4 config". I would recommend making a new config from scratch. It's generally OK to do this for small version changes, but going from 2.4 to 2.6 is probably a bit much given everything that's changed. 

Devfs shouldn't cause any problems either. Did you include it in the kernel config? I know it's marked obsolete, but it still works for now, so unless you want to move to udev, leave it in there. 

My current config is here if you want to try that. You'll need to change the sound driver at least for the SB card.

One last thing to tell your friend  :Smile:  - the lack of hardware mixing with an nForce board in Linux has nothing to do with Linux itself. nVidia simply don't want to release a driver that supports it, and AFAIK neither will they release the information required for other people to implement it.

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## der bastler

 *Wedge_ wrote:*   

> One thing that may have caused your problems is this: "made menuconfig by adjusting my old 2.4 config". I would recommend making a new config from scratch. It's generally OK to do this for small version changes, but going from 2.4 to 2.6 is probably a bit much given everything that's changed. 

 

"made menuconfig by adjusting my old 2.4 config" meant: I opened two terminals, one with "make menuconfig" in the old kernel directory and one with "make menuconfig" in the new kernel directory. And then... branch by branch...

 *Quote:*   

> One last thing to tell your friend  - the lack of hardware mixing with an nForce board in Linux has nothing to do with Linux itself. nVidia simply don't want to release a driver that supports it, and AFAIK neither will they release the information required for other people to implement it.

 

I know that. But it's better to have a functioning system than to present excuses...  :Wink: 

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## Wedge_

 *der bastler wrote:*   

> "made menuconfig by adjusting my old 2.4 config" meant: I opened two terminals, one with "make menuconfig" in the old kernel directory and one with "make menuconfig" in the new kernel directory. And then... branch by branch... 

 

Sorry, I thought you meant that you used "make oldconfig"  :Smile:  That way should be fine.

I don't know how I managed to forget this, but did you enable APIC support in your kernel config? It seems to cause frequent lockups on nForce2 boards at the moment, so you should usually disable it.

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## der bastler

 *Wedge_ wrote:*   

> I don't know how I managed to forget this, but did you enable APIC support in your kernel config? It seems to cause frequent lockups on nForce2 boards at the moment, so you should usually disable it.

 

That might be the malefactor, in my new/old 2.4.22-kernel it's disabled. Don't know if I had it enabled in one of my various 2.6-config versions...   :Confused: 

Well, I'll keep my 2.4-config, but... I wanted to buy a new graphics adapter next week, perhaps a 9600XT. That might be a new good reason for a kernel upgrade... 

 :Twisted Evil:   :Twisted Evil:   :Twisted Evil: 

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## javock

 *Wedge_ wrote:*   

> 
> 
> My current config is here if you want to try that. You'll need to change the sound driver at least for the SB card.

 

Have you got sensors to work? I checked and have the modules you created loaded in you config loaded

```
emma linux # lsmod

Module                  Size  Used by

w83781d                33600  0

nvidia               1701868  10

i2c_sensor              2432  1 w83781d

nls_cp437               5376  2

nls_iso8859_1           3712  3

i2c_nforce2             4352  0

i2c_core               21252  3 w83781d,i2c_sensor,i2c_nforce2

rtc                    10984  0

nvram                   7944  0

nvidia_agp              5148  1

ntfs                   85972  1

vfat                   12544  2

fat                    42016  1 vfat

rivafb                 44996  0

vgastate                9664  1 rivafb

3c59x                  30632  0

sg                     30092  0

sr_mod                 13088  0

```

I did what it's explained in this thread : https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=101573&highlight=sensor

But gkrellm2 does not recognize sensors working... also:

```

emma linux # ls -la /sys/bus/i2c/devices/

total 0

drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root            0 Jan 17 18:32 .

drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root            0 Jan 17 18:32 ..

```

And yes not having hardware mixing is a bitch!   :Evil or Very Mad: 

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## Wedge_

 *javock wrote:*   

> Have you got sensors to work? I checked and have the modules you created loaded in you config loaded 

 

Yes, they do work, although there are some minor problems (one of the temp readings is stuck at 63.5C for example), and gkrellm2 picks them up fine. You seem to be missing a module - this is what my lsmod looks like: 

```
w83781d                33664  0 

i2c_sensor              2304  1 w83781d

i2c_nforce2             5312  0 

i2c_dev                 8448  0 

i2c_core               21640  4 w83781d,i2c_sensor,i2c_nforce2,i2c_dev
```

Try loading i2c_dev and see if that helps.

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## cbradney

If you don't read lkml, you won't have read that there are issues with nforce2 and 2.6x.

Do you have ACPI/APIC and local APIC enabled? If so you need some patches. 

http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/12/21/7 is the thread to follow. Patches apply to gentoo-dev-source 2.6.1 too.

Basically its all to do with timing and interrupts etc. Read the lkml post and see if it applies to you. I have the patches applied here.. 100% stable.

A7N8X Deluxe v2.0 BIOS 1007.

Edit: There was also a mention of this on lkml affected The Other OS (tm) but people are just used to crashes there too much.

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## extatic

Im new to gentoo and to linux.. can you tell me how to apply the patches please?

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## Wedge_

@extatic: usually for kernel patches it's as simple as 

```
cd /usr/src/linux

patch -p1 < /path/to/the/patch/file
```

When you run the patch command, you'll see one or messages saying "patching file xxx", and possibly some stuff mentioning "fuzz" which you can ignore. If you see any messages about hunks failing, it means the patch didn't apply properly. After you've applied the patches, you need to recompile your kernel as usual, copy it to /boot and reboot before the patches will take effect.

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