Re: Solved Interrupt Problem with PGC-GR290K

John S. Andersen wrote:
> Roy I admire your persistence.
> 
> Had I known you were willing to go that far afield to get this 
> working, trying 3 different kernels, etc, I would have 
> suggested you get SuSE 8.2 and be done with it, as SuSE
> has all these things working and generally does it all correctly.
> 
I've heard a lot of good things about SuSE.  I'm running RedHat 7.2 
(sorta) at the moment.  I've been thinking about updating it - going to 
have to eventually.  I might just go to SuSE.

> I normally hesitate to suggest people switch distros, but in
> this case I would have made an exception, since you ended
> up with essentially NO Distro in the end.  In the past when ever
> I installed my own kernels I ended up with a system that
> was statically operational (i.e. it ran very well, but was difficult
> to change/maintain), and as such it proved a temporary
> solution at best.
> 
"No Distro" - that's certainly true.  Or it's a custom distro at best. 
I manage a few Linux machines and have been using RedHat's up2date 
service.  Works fine.  But I have no aversion to trying out SuSE. 
Thank's for the suggestion.

Roy


> 
> On 15 Aug 2003 at 10:43, Kimbrell, Roy wrote:
> 
> 
>>I'm reporting on the problem and it's solution in case this might help
>>others.  Earlier I had sent a long message describing the interrupt
>>problems.  If you are interested in the specific details see the
>>message to this list with subject, "Interrupt problem with
>>PCG-GR290K", dated 08/11/2003.
>>
>>To review the problem: the machine is a Sony Vaio PGC-GR290K. The
>>ohci1394 module wasn't loading (i.e., 'modprobe ohci1394' failed). 
>>The problem was that PCI wasn't mapping interrupts for the IEEE 
> 
> 1394
> 
>>device (as well as several other devices - modem, one USB port, 
> 
> etc.).
> 
>>I got into the PCI code and was a bit dismayed at the ad hoc 
> 
> methods
> 
>>used to map interrupts.  However, the most current ACPI patch does
>>wonders for interrupt mapping and handling.
>>
>>I had tried building several different kernels, some with code from
>>RedHat, some from kernel.org.  The RedHat kernels were a problem
>>because patches from other places (e.g., linux1394.org, and
>>sourceforge.net/projects/acpi couldn't be applied because of RedHat
>>changes.  I tried an Alan Cox 2.5.65 kernel from kernel.org, but 
> 
> there
> 
>>were many problems just building the kernel.  The module building 
> 
> and
> 
>>management code has changed in 2.5 which required changing some of 
> 
> the
> 
>>module utilities on my machine.  After much struggle, I finally got
>>the 2.5.65 kernel to build and load, but the 2.5.65 PCI and ACPI
>>didn't fix any problems.  That was probably because I didn't turn 
> 
> of
> 
>>the APM code in xconfig.  When APM is running, ACPI exits.  Didn't
>>learn that till much later.  Sigh.
>>
>>Earlier this week, I tried building the 2.4.20-19.7 kernel from
>>RedHat. 
>>  Still no luck.
>>
>>Finally, I built the 2.4.21 kernel from kernel.org.  Here's where I
>>learned about ACPI, APM, and APIC (don't know if APIC figures as 
> 
> part
> 
>>of the solution, but it had some interesting things to say in dmesg
>>which I'll relate later).
>>
>>Turned off APM in xconfig which allowed ACPI to run.  Still no 
> 
> luck.
> 
>>Here's the important stuff ....
>>
>>I applied the acpi-20030619-2.4.21 patch from 
>>soruceforge.net/projects/apci.  Now ACPI discovered the interrupts 
> 
> for
> 
>>the modem, third USB port, and the Firewire port and mapped them to
>>IRQ 9 (along with a lotta other stuff).
>>
>>Now the following works just fine:
>>
>>modprobe ieee1394
>>modprobe ohci1394
>>modprobe sbp2
>>
>>The devices still don't show up in /proc/scsi/scsi, but I ran 
>>'rescan-scsi-bus.sh' (http://linux1394.org/sbp2.html) and the 
> 
> Firewire
> 
>>devices showed up (a Maxtor disk and a Sony DVD R/RW drive).
>>
>>'mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp' mounted the Maxtor and
>>'mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd1 /mnt/tmp2' mounted the DVD drive.
>>
>>Copied my home directory, nearly 8 GB, to the Maxtor with no 
> 
> apparent
> 
>>difficulties (no complaints in /var/log/messages, anyway) - the 
> 
> data
> 
>>seems to be all there.  Was able to read a CD from the DVD drive.
>>Haven't tried writing to it yet.
>>
>>PS about APIC.  When it came up it said that the APIC had been
>>disabled by the BIOS (now why would it do that?), and APIC had
>>re-enabled it. Interesting.
>>
>>Regards,
>>Roy
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