I have a new motherboard with the k8t800 chipset and I inslalled it in my Slackware 10.0 system. I got a warning message about an unsupported chipset and the system wont login to x windows. I rebooted in in single user mode and tried the suggest `try-unsupoorted-chipset' option and the error message goes away but it still wont start x windows. Is this an nvidia driver issue?. If I use an old pci video card and generic vesa video in x windows, I can get it to work. I am sure there is a solution but I really looking for a simple fix that will allow open-gl rendering to work with this chipset. Would the 2.6 kernel from a Slack 10.2 upgrade solve my problem?

Possible. You can boot your system with a 10.2, according the first message from boot (bare.i root=/dev/hda1 noinitrd ro) in order to make tests. Upgrade the entire distro could be cool too (UPGRADE.TXT from the cd). And don't forget to reinstall NVIDIA driver each time you modify your kernel or your X11 package.

Hi,

It seems that the alsa modules were tripping it up. I just upgraded the box to 10.2 and after playing with hotplug a bit, it all works.

Is it possible you could share what you did to hotplug to get it to work?


Thanks!

what motherboard exactly? It can then be added to LQ HCL. Often if for example modem and sound card use i810 then blacklisting i810 in hotplug will prevent system thinking i810 is modem and loading that and forgetting sound card?

I would like to know what you did as well, as I get the same error message on my startup.

Perhaps I was not perfectly clear.

My machine would lock up when I started X and I assumed it was the video card since I got an error warning about the missing apggart at bootup. In order to fix this I modified the boot script to us the `try_agp_unsupported' option that was given in the boot up message. Now agpgart said that it identified the hardware in the K8 Northbridge. I was still having problems until I temprarily disabled the sound card by changing making the alsa srcipt in rc.d non executable. After that it booted up just fine and X would start. I changed the alsa script back to an executable script, rebooted and everything works fine. Your mileage may vary. Since then I have started using the 2.6 testing kernel and it is working as well. I think it might have newer agpgart code, but I didn't really check. I will login and post my lspci when I get home for your reference.

Ok, I will try and be as clear and complete as possible on how I solved my problem.

I had a machine with and old Shuttle slot A Athlon 750 and I decided to replace the ageing motherboard. This meant I had to purchase new memory but I took the plunge. The exising hard drive had Slackware 10.0 installed and configured for an AGP Geforce 2 MX 400 with the NVIDIA driver.

I ordered a new motherboard. A Chaintech SK8T800. When I went to put it the case I found that my old AGP 4X card woldn't fit the new AGX 4x/8x slot (silly me, I thought 4x was 4x but it isn't). I bit the bullet and order a new GeForce 6200 and put in and old pci Vanat LT to get by. When I put the new GeForce 6200 in the system, the system would boot but X would look the system on startup. Since the only thing I haad changed was the video card I went looking thought the boot record with dmesg and I found the following error:

Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 438M
agpgart: Unsupported Via chipset (device id: 0282), you might want to try agp_try_unsupported=1.
agpgart: no supported devices found.

(Note that this is the error message after I upgraded to 10.2, the 10.0 message may have differed slightly).

I tried the 10.2 upgrade but I still didn't have and agpgart supported device.

I now carefully considered the advice given in the error message and after consulting an old copy ``The Slackware Book'', I decided to wade through the startup scripts. using

cat foo.bar > grep agp

I eventually decided to modify /etc/rc.d/rc.modules. Embedded in this file is the following script.

### AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) GART support ###
# This module takes care of programming the GART (part of your motherboard's
# chipset that handles gathering data from memory and passing it to the
# card) and enables faster AGP transfers. The AGP GART module is required
# to use AGP features of your 3D rendering video card. You'll need this to
# use XFree86's direct rendering support, for example.
/sbin/modprobe agpgart

So I took a stab and added the rcommended change so the script in rc.modules was


### AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) GART support ###
# This module takes care of programming the GART (part of your motherboard's
# chipset that handles gathering data from memory and passing it to the
# card) and enables faster AGP transfers. The AGP GART module is required
# to use AGP features of your 3D rendering video card. You'll need this to
# use XFree86's direct rendering support, for example.
/sbin/modprobe agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1

(Note this is from memory, see below) And it the AGP was found in the K8 Northbridge. I still wasn't out of the woods. X still locked up the machine when I ran startx.

Now a little desperate, I went fishing. I turned off every startup script in rc.d that I thought I could do without and X started working. Later I was able to turn all of the scripts back on and everything seemed to play together nicely.

When I started using the 2.6 testing kernel, I found the it was no longer necessary to pass the optuion to the agpgart module and I returned the rc.modules script to it's original form. Now my dmesg reveals

agpgart: Detected AGP bridge 0
agpgart: AGP aperture is 128M @ 0xf0000000

and later

agpgart: Found an AGP 3.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 8x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 8x mode
agpgart: Found an AGP 3.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 8x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 8x mode

So my best advice is to move to the 2.6.x testing kernel or, if you don't want to do that, try passing the module parameter as I did originally. I had to reinstall the NVIDIA driver for the new kernel but it works fine with the Doomsday engine and I can even run the windows QUAKE 2 under Wine.


By the way, in case you care and are still reading, I am quite sure my alsa issue is caused by a conflict of my on board USB and the Ensoniq 5880 (Soundblaster) as both are trying to use interrupt 10 and my current dmesg says, rather ominously,

irq 10: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
[<c0132f12>] __report_bad_irq+0x22/0x90
[<c0133018>] note_interrupt+0x68/0xc0
[<c0132aa9>] __do_IRQ+0xb9/0xc0
[<c010475a>] do_IRQ+0x1a/0x30
[<c010311a>] common_interrupt+0x1a/0x20
handlers:
[<c0253910>] (usb_hcd_irq+0x0/0x60)
Disabling IRQ #10

Note that IRQ #10 is used by, according to /proc/interrupts,

10: 100000 XT-PIC ehci_hcd:usb1, Ensoniq AudioPCI

So my sound and my USB seem to be conflicting. I haven't really tried to fix it since the sound works, somewhat, and I don't really use the USB on this machine. But I bet this might be fixed by playing with the module options as well. Perhaps I will just turn of the USB instead.

Now, just for completeness, my lspci is

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8T800Pro Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:09.0 Serial controller: 3Com Corp, Modem Division 56K FaxModem Model 5610 (rev 01)
00:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI (rev 02)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 6200 (rev a1)

On my older pc I have SW10.2 with test26s kernel. There ,too, eventhough pci-sharing is working it's doing so incompletely. I needed my nic for my dsl, and needed my usb(extra pci card) so I had to takeout the SB pci card(no sound) because usb used irq 10 and 11,the nic shared 10,and SB used 10 and 5 as well. The parallel port used 7. I tried swithching SB irqs to no avail. 4 free irqs but no help. After the SB was out peace returned.
Yet on newer pc with 2.6.14,NVidia agp8x card and Debian Etch irq 10 is shared by sound,nic and usb with with no problems. The the usb chip uses 9 or 11 as well. Another partition with SW10.2 and test26s has no irq problems and sound works.I think that this irq-sharing and acpi don't have kinks worked out.
Thanx for the detailed note. It is sure to help other users.