Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, James Miller wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, sindi keesan wrote:
>
> > Our fastest computer no longer boots into linux, starting today (after I 
> > changed to the onboard AGP video from PCI, and changing back did not help).
>
> I ran into some really wierd problem regarding PCI bus and Linux recently: I 
> could not get any (PCI) NIC to work with any Linux I tried in the machine in 
> question. I presumed from the testing I did that the PCI bus was somehow 
> incompatible with Linux: first time I've ever seen anything like that. But it 
> doesn't sound like your problem is of this nature.

> Here's a possibility, though. I assume the onboard AGP is sharing the 
> computer's RAM for its memory? I had some wierd problems associated with 
> shared RAM with onboard video. It didn't involve booting, but the computer

Yes it is but it was doing so before.  We have onboard SiS AGP (which I 
checked with whatvga2, old version) before this all started - maybe that 
somehow messed things up?  I had linux working with the SiS okay, then for 
some reason we put in a PCI card and changed BIOS to use PCI first and 
that worked okay.  Then I changed to SiS again and linux won't boot to 
ext2 or loop now (it works from ramdisk).  I ran memtest with the PCI card 
and it detected 252 of the 256MB RAM.  I had left 4MB RAM shared by the 
AGP, as before (it could also be 2 or 8MB).  So the SiS chip seems to keep 
using the RAM even when that video is not used.

> kept freezing up after running for a time (after several days, I believe). 
> When that would happen, I could do nothing but hit the power button and 
> restart. Pretty disconcerting. I determined it wasn't application-related. I 
> decided it could well be the shared RAM not being actually shared properly. I 
> shut down the onboard video and got myself a decent video card, and the 
> problem went away. I therefore avoid onboard video with shared RAM whenever 
> possible. Could this be a source for your problems?

It was not until now, and powering off does not fix things.  I will try 
swapping hard drives around (put in another linux drive to see if it 
works, put this one in another computer).

The computer was in use yesterday but my partner cannot remember whether 
it was used in DOS or linux.

> James
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org