'vintage' via dma bug

febo@delenda.net · *nix forums beginner Joined: 18 Jul 2006 Posts: 1

I have the misfortune to run a rather old PIII machine with a VIA chipset,
a Fedora Core 1 distro with 2.4.22 kernel and two PATA hard mirrored hard
disk, on two separate channels, both set to primary. I've experienced some
data corruption lately and after much googling I've found that 4-5 years
ago some via chipset experienced a similar problem with dma transfers,
especially with hard disk configured the very same way as my setup. The bug
was fixed, I gather, in 2.4.4. I've upgrade the kernel to 2.6.10 (the
latest Fedora legacy core *TWO* kernel, with fingers crossed) but the
corruption problems usually start to pop up only after a few weeks of
uptime, especially under relatively heavy load.
I couldn't find more precise pointers after all these years so I'd like to
know if that bug really affected my chipset, and if 2.6.10 is a valid
solution..

the kernel identifies the chipset at boot:

# dmesg | fgrep -i via
ACPI: DSDT (v001 VIA APOLLO-P 0x00001000 MSFT 0x0100000b) @ 0x00000000
PCI: Via IRQ fixup
agpgart: Detected VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset
VP_IDE: VIA vt82c686a (rev 22) IDE UDMA66 controller on pci0000:00:07.1
parport_pc: VIA 686A/8231 detected
parport_pc: VIA parallel port: io=0x378, irq=7

# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C693A/694x [Apollo PRO133x]
(rev
c4)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C598/694x [Apollo
MVP3/Pro133x AG
P]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South]
(rev 22
)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc.
VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/
C/VT8235 PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 10)
00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6202 [USB 2.0 controller]
(rev
10)
00:07.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6202 [USB 2.0 controller]
(rev
10)
00:07.4 SMBus: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 30)
00:0e.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev
0 Cool

00:0f.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev
0 Cool

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL AGP 2X (rev
27)

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