# Gentoo on an Intel D945GCLF2 [solved]

## alyf

Hello,

I am trying to get 2008.0 x86 running on this board, and I am encountering a number of issues that are driving me mad.

My setup: D945GCLF2 (with a dual-core atom 330), 2GB DDR2-667, a 300GB SATA disk (Seagate ST3300622AS), USB mouse and keyboard, external USB cdrom, an Intel GbE card in the PCI slot.

All hardware is known good: the same system has completed a 1-day memtest86 run without a single error, and windows xp works just fine on it.

I am booting from the 2008.0 install media in the usb cdrom; the problems I am seeing are:

1) After boot the onboard HD controller (ICH7, handled by the ata_piix driver) is left in an unusable state: writing to disk takes forever, and hdparm -t /dev/sda yields an amazing 3 MB/s; I suspect something during the SATA module probing is screwing up the controller settings.

In reality I have no way to check what's going on, since USB storage verbose debugging is enabled on the install media: by the time I get to a command prompt, the whole kernel log buffer has been clobbered by usbstor "operation successful" messages. Anyway, adding "nosata" on the boot commandline fixes this.

2) There seems to be something wrong with the BIOS when booting from HD. If I do a standard grub MBR install I get a "no bootable device" error (same problem as here); the only way to get it working is to install grub onto the boot partition first cylinder and to mark the boot partition active.

I am in no way a grub expert, but I cannot find a logical explanation for this behavior: the BIOS should not care about what is on the disk (apart from loading the bootloader code from the MBR), but the error I get when there is no active partition does not look like a grub error (and the MBR contains grub, not the standard dos/windows bootloader).

3) Something is *very* broken with ACPI on this board. Symptoms are CPU soft lockups in the acpi parser code which results in kacpid CPU hogging (and no, kacpid has nothing to do with KDE). It generally starts with one (virtual HT) CPU locking up while there is some system activity (e.g. when emerging a package), which leaves the system responsive, then the other CPUs follow randomly. In the end the system stops responding and just keeps showing "CPU soft lockup detected" dumps.

Booting with acpi=off definitely avoids the problem (but as ACPI is used to discover MP information this leaves you with a single non-HT core, which on this CPU sucks big time).

Disabling IO and local APIC support ("noapic nolapic") seems to solve the soft lockup issues, but I have seen the board lock up hard at least once (no error messages, it just stopped responding). It may or may not be the same problem: it happened after quite some time (hours), while with no boot flags things usually start to go wrong within minutes.

4) Last but not least, the onboard RTL8111 PCIe NIC does not work (cable is not detected). I guess this is just a driver issue (the realtek IC seems to be a new unsupported revision), but I have not investigated this, since I had enough on my plate -- I just popped in an Intel NIC I had handy. What I can tell you is that the card works flawlessly under windows with the latest drivers from realtek.

Is anybody having a better time with this hardware?

AndreaLast edited by alyf on Fri Nov 07, 2008 10:07 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## Sperlock

I'm trying to install Gentoo 2008.0 (or anything that will damn work) and have the onboard RTL8111 NIC.  So far the only luck I have found with it was being able to get it working under Kubuntu 8.0.4.  I really don't want to go a roundabout way to get Gentoo installed, but it looks like I'll have little choice.

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## alyf

I found  the source of all evil    :Confused: 

(not really: 1 and 2 above are still there)

I disabled the onboard LAN in the BIOS and everything started working like a charm -- it's been emerging world for the past few hours without any errors.

From a little online research it seems that support for the RTL8111C in linux is quite flaky: I guess we can only wait for a working driver to make it into the kernel.

With the lockups gone this board is really nice to work with: it's cheap, reasonably well performing and it fits neatly inside a Travla C146. Well, the enclosed I/O shield is too tall, but that's being picky.  :Laughing: 

Andrea

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## djselbeck

Perhaps you should try the r8168 driver instead of the r8169 driver. You can get it from the realtek site. It is also working better on my Dell Vostro notebook

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## ocbMaurice

Please try to disable the automatic fan throttling in the BIOS.

It seems that this solves the problem for me (fixed the speed at 50%).

For the info:

D945GCLF2

RTL 8139 PCI Card

Tried amd64 and i686 release

Both have the issue with kacpid.

The best information about this Problem can be found here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/254326

Credits go to Tefnet Developers, good find man!

Hopefully this will solve it for you too.

p.s. If it does, please add [solved] to the title

edit: I'm quite positive that this is the root of all evil. I'm compiling world now, and have never get that far before.

Working as expected. I'm quite curious if intel fucked that up or if it's a kernel issue.

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## alyf

 *ocbMaurice wrote:*   

> Please try to disable the automatic fan throttling in the BIOS.
> 
> It seems that this solves the problem for me (fixed the speed at 50%).

 

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner: disabling fan control effectively seems to avoid any crashes, even when using the onboard NIC.

And there is even more: the SATA issues seem to be gone, too.  :Shocked: 

So I guess the problem is that every time a fan speed change is needed, something (maybe related to interrupt handling?) is triggered that throws the linux ACPI VM out of whack.  Just when we all thought that crappy BIOSes doing stupid things in SMM were a thing of the past...

Incidentally, this also solves the only problem I encountered while running windows (yes, I admit doing that  :Embarassed: ) on this thing: random lockups on boot while loading the acpi tables driver. This mainly happened when the board had been off for a while -- a condition in which the rising temperature would make fan speed changes more likely.

Andrea

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## ocbMaurice

Glad this solves it for you too.

Seems like we've found a oddity here.

Well, I can live with it that way.

But maybe some kernel/acpi hacker will enlighten us, why this happens  :Smile: 

And I'm sure this thread will be googled quite often until then  :Wink: 

 *Quote:*   

> I'm quite curious if intel fucked that up or if it's a kernel issue.

 

I will bet my money on intel, lol.

Looks like MS doesn't care that much about the data linux chokes on.

I suspect there something badly going wrong on the SMBus.

If you still have windows there, you might can try SpeedFan? Maybe you see something there?

This should propably be reported upstream to the kernel/kacpid devs, so they can further investigate.

Anyway, I'm happy that I can put this board into action soon!

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## mndar

I fixed the ethernet issue (eth link down) issue by compiling the r8168 driver from http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3

Right now I'm trying to get CPU Frequency Scaling working. I'm using kernel 2.6.23.1 

Does Atom 330 support frequency scaling? 

Another thing is temperature monitoring. lm_sensors loads the following modules: smsc47m1,eeprom,smsc47m192,i2c_i801

None of which show the cpu temperature or any other temperature for that matter. Any ideas whats misising ?

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## alyf

 *mndar wrote:*   

> Does Atom 330 support frequency scaling?

 

No (see http://ark.intel.com/cpu.aspx?groupId=35641). Scaling is only enabled on the mobile (Zxxx and Nxxx) parts, which in turn do not support 64-bit mode.

 *mndar wrote:*   

> Another thing is temperature monitoring. lm_sensors loads the following modules: smsc47m1,eeprom,smsc47m192,i2c_i801
> 
> None of which show the cpu temperature or any other temperature for that matter. Any ideas whats misising ?

 

I can't help you right now because my board has long since been reassigned to other tasks (not going back to Linux on this thing until Intel releases a working BIOS); however a quick google search seems to indicate that temperature monitoring does indeed not work on this board.

andrea

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## mndar

Ok...thats 2 things off the TODO list! *Quote:*   

> until Intel releases a working BIOS)

 

What do you mean? I've been using Gentoo on this for just a day. Didn't notice any problems yet.

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## alyf

Well, if you read the whole thread you will see that in order to avoid random lockups with linux on this board you either have to disable ACPI (which is a no-go) or to turn off fan control. IMO this is a clear indication that there is something wrong with the bios (which in my experience is not uncommon with Intel-made boards).

BTW, I just upgraded the board to the latest revision (released on december 19), but sadly the problems are still there.

andrea

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## .yankee

Hi everyone and thanks for all the tips given on the subject so far. 

I have big favor to ask of you people:

 Could someone put somewhere a kernel config he/she uses with the said motherboard? 

My trouble is, that I can only do headless management of my box and thus have problems with having a newly compiled kernel to start. I've tried using the wonderful Pappy's seeds and putting in just the necessary hardware stuff. It seems I'm missing something though.

I can only ssh to the box from my laptop and I managed to get the atom board online with the default kernel from gentoo 2008.0 minimal install CD and the r8168 driver.

Thanks in advance!

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## mndar

Here is my config. I'm using 2.6.23.1

http://mndar.phpnet.us/gclf2/gclf2_config.txt

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## .yankee

 *mndar wrote:*   

> Here is my config. I'm using 2.6.23.1
> 
> http://mndar.phpnet.us/gclf2/gclf2_config.txt

 

Thanks a lot! Will try asap.

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