Tyan S4881 (K8QW) BIOS settings, boot problem
 

Hi All,

I have a Tyan S4881 motherboard with 4 dual core AMD Opteron CPUs. (BIOS V1.06) With kernel 2.6.21.5 (and several other Fedora and Live CD kernels) it does strange things.
Having only 1 SATA HDD connected to the onboard controller
- If Interrupt mode is set to APIC in BIOS, sata_nv module fails with "qc timeout" messages.
- If interrupt mode is set to PIC, no drives recognized.
It boots only with the "noapic" boot option.

- If ACPI is emabled in BIOS, kernel freezes immediately at boot at the first line beginning with "ACPI: .... " (just after bringing up CPU 0)

If somebody have the same motherboard working, would you check for me
- Is ACPI Enabled?
- Interrupt mode is APIC or PIC?
- Are there any kernel parameters necessary to boot? Kernel version?
- Any other experience?

Thank you
Gabor

Quick look on Tyan site has similiar questions in the online support. One ask for bios settings for linux but others seems close. Check them out. If not then call them or email them. Calling tyan support is ususally faster than emailing.

Brian