[clug] IDE Stalling On nForce2 Chipset?

[Darren Freeman]

Alex,

You are experiencing the same problem I had before getting rid of that
motherboard. I swear never to buy another nVidia chipset and run Linux
on it.

The solution is to put the following into your boot config:

"noapic nolapic acpi=off"

Note that your IDE will now run like shit but rock solid. Try passing
that in a hurry! (ouch! I take it back..)

This was originally suggested to me by David Tulloh on this list.
Message pasted below.

Have fun,
Darren

--------8<--------8<--------8<--------

The problem is with the IO with linux, it was introduced in 2.5 and I
believe 2.4.22.  I had it for a while, I was hoping that they would fix
it
in 2.6.  LKML was aware of the problem, I'm not sure if they have fixed
it
though.

To stop the problem you need to disable local APIC.  This needs to be
done
in the boot kernel options.
for asus, people reported that: "noapic nolapic acpi=off" was required
personally I found just nolapic did the trick, but I don't have an asus

There was also dicussions on the greater internet about a patch that
fixed
it for 2.4.22, and people reporting that bios updates fixed it.  I
haven't
tried either so don't know if it does/doesn't work.