A solution for vpd keys error and jerky video
 

Hi,

I must apologise if this has been covered but I couldn't find it when I needed it.
This is to help anyone who like me didn't know what to do but hopefully this may save others time.
I have a Shuttle SN95G5 which like many motherboards has a Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet controller on board.
When I first installed linux I was getting problems with video jerking periodically, say every second or so. I originally thought this could have been my graphics card and drivers and being an nvidia got their driver and installed. I thought I had followed their instructions but I missed a step and this caused further problems more on that in a moment.
Part of the install process for the nvidia driver requires runlevel 3 (command prompt for noobs) and when I booted into runlevel 3 I got a recurring error message relating to the network device.
This repeated every second or so and caused the command line to be very difficult to use. You could still type but not see what you were typing.
To stop this message initially all I could do was to stop the network from starting up.
Note that this problem doesn't affect terminal windows in runlevel 5.
Not fancying the idea of having to use my only PCI slot for a new network card I spent much time searching and rooting around forums I finally stumbled on a solution.
Unfortunately I cannot find the original post I used so I can't credit the relevant people for this.

BE WARNED
This worked for me but might not for you so don't blame me if it messes up your hardware. Also I think this may only work for Marvell Yukon boards

Ok so the wonderful people at ASUS released a patch for this problem on their motherboard, the KV8 i think. This guy in his post said that he used this patch on his shuttle and it worked so I think the patch is specifically for the marvell device and is motherboard independent.
I was getting annoyed with my jerky video and was sure that the frequency of the jerk and the frequency of the message were no coincidence, so I tried it and it worked for me too.

What you need is a DOS boot disk and the files extracted from the archive you can get

here

follow the instructions in the readme and hey presto no more messages.

Incidentally I was right the messages were causing the jerking (and also huge log files).

Secondly the video was still slightly jerky, the reason?
I forgot to remove 1 line from xorg.conf namely

Load "dri"
in the module section

So this was being used instead of the accelerated nvidia driver.

Moral?
Read readme files properly


Finally sorry if this story is a little long winded but I hope it helps you as much as that patch helped me. It made mythtv (the reason I got the shuttle amongst others) a viable option. So thanks to the nameless saviour who's post I can't find.

Good luck
Fraser

Hi,

I have also been annoyed by the VPD-key errors mentioned above. My motherboard (DFI Lanparty UT nF4 Ultra-D / Athlon 64) comes with a Marvell Yukon network interface, whose latest Linux-driver (sk98lin) kept logging errors like mad. I had already seen that there was a patch for ASUS boards elsewhere, but I was not courageous enough to run it on my non-ASUS board. Having read the above report I felt confident enough to try it, too, and I can happily confirm that this indeed solves the problem. The BIOS-patch obviously really only changes the part concerning networking, everything else seems to be untouched. Networking works as it should now.

Best regards,
Markus

Hey, I have the same problem, except I have knoppix+winXP, and your link is broken. Could someone direct me in the right direction?

The file was on the Asus website:
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx
I believe the patch was released for one of their K8V series motherboards. I have had a quick look for it but couldn't see it and I'm afraid I don't have the time to look for it just now. If you look at the bios updates for each of the K8V series of boards you should see something relating to the network interface which uses a Marvell Yukon chipset. If you can't find it there the only other place I could suggest is to try and track down a generic patch if one has been released by Marvell. Beyond that, I'm afraid I can't help you. The problem as always lies with the "if it ain't windows, I don't care" attitude of companies. The other thing you can do if you don't need to work in rl3 much and don't need network while there is to prevent the network from starting up. You can't do any network stuff but you don't get the message. Or you can just ignore it and type through it, so long as you don't make and typos and aren't totally reliant on seeing the output of the command you typed, it sucks I know but its what I had to do until I got the patch.

thx
 

Thank you. It seems that this wasn't really the problem, but just the last error comming up.

I have been trying to figure this issue out for about a week on a new system I built and set it up with Novell - thought it was a novell issue and they had no clue, no help whatsoever...Decided to google it and came across this forum (THANK GOODNESS) and now can confirm the issue is definately due to the Yukon NIC (novell gave super detailed error). I am going to update the bios patch tonight and will post results asap!

Thanks!