Asus P4C800 / Intel i875, AGP and stuff
 

Hi!

I just found this forum, in search of answers. I didn't find the ones I were looking for, though, but this place seems nice enough.

Yesterday, I installed a P4 on an Asus P4C800 motherboard, it's one of the i875p motherboards. I have two major issues with it.
If you can help with just anything, I'm very grateful.

1) agpgart; the 2.4.20 doesn't detect the i875. The 2.5.6x+ detects the i875 and seems to run it the same way as an i845, from what I can see. So I patched my 2.4.20 the same way.
But my Radeon 9700 pro either hangs after a little while, showing a white hardware-sprite looking square in the top left corner, or it crashes completely and turns off the monitor signal.
Has anyone got the i875 AGP running? With AGP8x? With an ATI Radeon 9700? Or know what I should do to get it to work? Or heard anything about it?
The ATI drivers doesn't compile under 2.5, and what I know there isn't any other drivers for the 9700 (r300). (Tell me if I'm wrong.)

2) the secondary ide/raid controller, an Promise PDC20378. Linux completely ignores it. I haven't seen any kernel with PDC203xx or PDC20x78 support. Anyone heard anything about that?
I'd like to use the two disks I want to put on it.

The P4C800/i875 has SATA controllers too, but I don't need those, so I don't have to ask anything about them not working. :cool:

help?
/Mirar

Hi
I also have a
P4C800 Asus M/b
P4 2.4(ht,fsb800)
Ati 9700pro 128mb
1gig 400ddr


but with a seagate barrucda 120g sata150 hd

I`am trying to install mandrake 9.1,in which i`ve read that it`s supposed to support the sata h/d.

But I can`t get mandrake to find the hd.

the msg is "no valid device found".

If i can get past this then i might be able to help you with your problem.

My complete setup is

Asus P4C800 motherboard
P4c 2.6GHz/800MHz FSB
Hercules 3d Prophet 9700 pro (same same, just more heatsinks)
2Gb "DDR320" (3x512Mb PC2700 + 512Mb PC3200)
main p-ata 0 m: IBM 180GXP 120Gb
main p-ata 0 s: IBM 180GXP 120Gb
main p-ata 1 m: Plextor 16x CD-R
main p-ata 1 s: Sony CD player
promise p-ata m: IBM 120GXP 80Gb
promise p-ata s: Seagate Barracuda IV 80Gb
main and promise s-ata: nothing
The CPU and the Radeon is watercooled. I also have a waterblock for the chipset in the watercooling system, but it seemed impossible to put it on the i875 without glueing it on, no holes in the mobo... :(

I read something about the SATA and i875, I wonder if it wasn't in the changelog for 2.5.69 or 2.5.70. Check the linux-kernel mailing list. You might need to run a beta kernel. :( (I have no idea how to do that in Mandrake 9.1.) It might be there in the newest patches for 2.4.21 too.

I dual-boot Gentoo Linux and Windows (for games). :cool:

/Mirar
http://www.mirar.org/casev2

install RH on Asus p4C800-DX
 

I'm having similar trouble and need to know how just to get the OS installed. I've tried several versions of Linux on the Asus p4C800-dx. RH 8.0 and 9.0 on both cdrom and DVD. I've also tried SUSE 8.0 and 8.1. With RH, installations begins with booting to the cd noramlly, then the normal country and language questions then after that it asks for the location of the linux images. This is where things stop. It gives the option to pick a cdrom drive or a hdd if you have one setup with a readable partition but it claims no images exist anywhere, regardless of what you copied to the hdd or put in the cdrom or dvd.

system specs are as follows:

p4 3ghz/800
asus p4C800 deluxe
2x512mb/400mhx Samsung DDR mem
MSI G-Force Ti4800 128mb DDR
open 52x24x52x cdrw
toshiba 16x dvdrom
2x80gb 7200 rpm wd hdd (no raid, win2k on 1st hdd)

pcdoctor: is the hdd's on sata or normal (p) ata?

I haven't tried installing the system, but I had no problem getting things to at least boot using Gentoo, but my disks are on old style p-ata, not s-ata.

Oh, and an update: the PDC20378 is also on the FastTrak S150 TX2plus PCI card, I understand. There doesn't seem to be a Linux driver for that either, yet (not even on Promise' site).

installing rh on p4c800
 

The hdds are regular 80gb western digital 7200rpm hdd. I have tried them on the regular ata and on the promise 20378 contrller. Asus has a redhat and suse driver for the promise controller on there website. with win2k its easy, hit f6 at boot and then load the drivers, but linux? I dunno.

Where'd you find the drivers? I looked and looked...

I think you need both the disk to install on and the CD on the ICH5 controller (as opposite to the Promise controller) to install. Wanna try Gentoo? It's a bit rough to install, but then it's very nice and configurable.

found the drivers on asus' website

http://www.asus.com/support/download...ux.zip~zaqwedc

good boards, lousy website, although it's improved over previous versions.

As for Gentoo, I don't know what that is but I'm willing to try it if it means getting linux on this system. I have to do this for a customer that has an upcoming linux class that he has to teach but he doesn't know how to install it.

If I have the hdds on the regular ide during the install it gives me an option to get the linux images from a hdd but of course it doesn't find any there even if I copied all of the cds to the hdd. If I put the hdds on raid controller then it only gives the option to get the linux images from the cdrom, and again doesn't find any there. If it can't find the lousy cdrom then how does it manage to boot to it?

Hmm, looks great but needs odd 2.4.18 kernels (old RH or Suse, appearantly). :/

Gentoo is a bit special, because it compiles everything and downloads everything over the network. Being in a school with good connection or on broadband this is usually not a problem. You will probably want to install a "stage 3" tarball with the system (some things precompiled, like the compiler). But read about it around http://www.gentoo.org. There's also an IRC channel (of course) with generally helpful people.

You can have four things on the ICH5 controller, two connectors with two items each. That leaves a lot of room for CD's and IDE disks.
Two disks and a CD player shouldn't be a problem. I can't see why RH or Suse wouldn't install...

Only if you want to use the Promise raid parts or if you have more then 4 items (I have 4 disks and 2 CD-ish units) you need to use the Promise.

I am thinking of getting one of these new Intel 875P boards....

Shall I hold on for the linux support to get a bit better??????

Just get one and help us straighten out the issues, will you? :D

If you can wait with getting a new computer for a month or two until the support gets in 2.4.x, I think I'd recommend that right now. :(

Or if you don't need more then the VESA video driver (for instance a console-less server) and you don't need the Promise controller.

you are crazy man.... but this website rules!!

Well, it is almost totally silent. :D

Asus P4C800 Linux Drivers
 

There are source code (tar file) Linux drivers for the
P4C800 sound, LAN, and Promise ATA controllers, in case
you folks haven't found them yet. Go to
http://usa.asus.com/, find the P4C800, and click on
"Download" on the upper left area of the page. In the
resulting page, click on the "All" tab, then choose Linux
in the "OtherOS" list. You'll get a table showing the
three drivers.

Using the Opera browser, I had to download each one twice,
as the first attempt yielded a small text file or something.
But eventually you get a zipped tarfile of the specified
size.

The Promise 20378 driver will hopefully make the kernel
recognize the chip. The bit about the kernel not dealing
with the i875 chip is scary.

I might want to get a P4C800 and run SuSE 8.2 on it.
If anyone gets that or any other version of Linux running
well on this motherboard, I'd appreciate knowing about it.

Thanks!

Mark S Bilk
mark@cosmicpenguin.com

I can't find any tarballs... :(
I see three zip files,
1985_linux.zip, sound driver
042_linux.zip, 3com gigabit driver
378Linux.zip, promise driver

I haven't checked the other two, but the Promise driver is binary only (.o kernel module files for RH 7.3, 8.0 and Suse 8.0, 8.1). Those doesn't exactly fit a kernel new enough to support the i875 AGP... :(

Did you find driver source, or a semi-source driver (like the ones on the promise site, with a .o object file and source glue to link it with the kernel)? Please send it to me...

I had a report of someone successfully installing Suse on it, but I don't know if it was 8.1 or 8.2... I'll poke a bit.

Oops! Sorry, you are right. I only looked at the audio
and nic files, and they are source tarballs, but the one
for Promise 20378 is only modules, for kernel 2.4.19 or
lower.
.
Where do you see Linux drivers on the Promise website?
I can't find them.
.
Both Asus and Promise are located near to me. On Monday
I'll try calling them up to see what they have for Linux
support. Since Promise is making disk I/O chips and
cards, and Linux is widely used on servers with a lot of
disk, maybe they can be motivated to release the driver
source, or at least keep it more up to date for the
latest kernel.
.
Regarding the AGP problem, is your Radeon card the newer
low voltage (.8 or 1.5 volt) type? The older ones
(3 volt?) won't work.
.
What happens when you try to compile the Radeon driver
for kernel 2.5? Maybe you can fix it. Or since they are
providing source, and thus are favorable to Linux, maybe
they will fix it if asked.
.
The linux-kernel mailing list FAQ http://www.tux.org/lkml/
says the list is gated to this newsgroup: fa.linux.kernel
which can be read via google:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...kernel&num=100
.
Using google advanced search, and looking for "i875" or
"intel875" (which doesn't find anything) or "875", in this
newsgroup, there is almost no mention of the i875 chipset
in the kernel mailing list.
.
Most references to i845 mention AGP. Is AGP the only thing
the kernel has to deal with in the i845 or i875 chipset?
.
If not, it seems dangerous to run Linux on a motherboard
that has a master chip set (i875) that the kernel is not
designed to deal with.
.
Maybe this discussion should also be posted to Usenet,
e.g., comp.os.linux.misc and comp.os.linux.hardware.
A lot more people would see it there.
.
Mark Bilk mark@cosmicpenguin.com

Aww, I thought you found something good. :-(

As far as I can tell, it's three things with the i875 that the kernel has to deal with, 1) AGP, 2) ATA controller and 3) S-ATA controller.

The (P)ATA controller is so standard that the generic support works well. The S-ATA has had issues, I don't know how resolved those are, but appearantly at least some got it running with Suse.
The AGP shouldn't be an issue, but it is. I've failed researching more, I was kind of discouraged when none of the number of people I tried to query about it (Asus, and three Linux developers) answered.

Linux drivers can be found on Promise' website under "download", if there is Linux drivers for that card. They only support their own card; they don't provide drivers for "built-in" chips in other products. Appearantly the driver for S150 TX2plus could work (same chip?), but that driver seems to be binary-module-only too.

Oh, and the Hercules 3d prophet 9700 pro is a 0.8 volt 8x AGP card. It seems to work well under Windows on the same machine, and it works skipping the agp driver under Linux, using the VESA driver (800x600 yay).

Hi,

i have just tested the P4C800 asus motherboard with a western digital raptor 36Go Sata.
mandrake find the hd when i configure the ide in the bios :
main / config IDE
onboard ide operate mode / compatible

then the second ide is the sata ide

pascal

Does anyone got any graphics card to run on this box, with a non-generic driver? nVidia Geforce or any Radeon?

Installed one last week
 

Hello,

Last week I also installed a new system with a P4C800 Deluxe motherboard. Have an Asus 9280/TD Videocard (NVidia Geforce4 4200), 2.6 GHz proc with 800MHz FSB, 1GB PC3200 memory (2 x 512MB).

The whole system functions like you would expect for an Asus system. Some problems though:

- The NIC driver has to be installed seperatly but is available on the download site of asus. This is a opensource driver, therefor just compile and it works.

- The Videodriver is available from NVidia. This is a default driver for allmost all chipsets of NVidia and it works like charm. This one also has it's own AGP driver that can be used instead of AGPART.

- There are no drivers available at the moment for the Promise 20378 RAID controller. There are some binary drivers but none for the latest kernels and latest distributions.

- The sound driver is available from the alsa-site (http://www.alsa-project.org/) Version 0.9.4 works for me, just have some problems here with sound volume etc but have the idea that they have to do with the kind of speakers I use. Don't have a 6.1 set at the moment so I just use 2 simple speakers from an older PC.

I hope I have been of some assistence, and would really like to hear it if someone has found a sollution for the Promise 20378 controller.

Greetings,
Jan Hugo Prins

Some updates to my post regarding drivers for this beast:

- The Promise Serial ATA Driver is available at the following website:
http://www.antgel.co.uk/compsci/linu...ise_raid.shtml

Some info from the readme:
/*********************************************************************
* PROMISE FastTrak TX4000/376/378/S150 TX Series Linux Driver README
*
* PROMISE Linux support team <support@promise.com.tw> 2003/02/20
*********************************************************************/
I have installed this driver and it seems to load ok. Can't test anything more at the moment because I don't have anything connected to this controller yet.

- The sound is working flawlesly after installing some alsa-mixer tools etc and changing some mixer settings.

- There is a new driver for the Ethernet controller (version 044) at the asus website. Installed it and don't have any problems with it till now.

Good Luck.
Jan Hugo:)

Hmm, the link doesn't work?

An update from me: I put a nVidia FX 5200 in the machine, and it works excellent. The issue seems to be only with Radeon, maybe only 9700.

Sorry, now it works.

JH

Thanks. Downloaded and compiled. But:

Jul 8 15:35:05 orchid kernel: PROMISE FastTrak TX4000/376/378/S150 TX Series Linux Driver Version 1.00.0.15
Jul 8 15:35:05 orchid kernel: ft3xx: Insufficient System Memory !!
Jul 8 15:35:05 orchid kernel: ft3xx: ft3xx Driver Module removed !!
Jul 8 15:35:05 orchid kernel: ft3xx: No valid controller detected

How much memory do I need? I have 2Gb in the machine plus 1Gb swap... :confused:

# cat /proc/meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 1988734976 1982849024 5885952 0 81911808 1451278336
Swap: 1077501952 172691456 904810496

My system has 1GB of memory and didn't have any problems. Default up2date redhat 9 system. And we have the same mainboard as far as I know (P4C800 DeLuxe).

Could it be that this .o file that is in the archive is not compiled for a bigmem system? Don't know what the implications are there with systems with that much memory. Or, is 2GB not BigMEM? Was BigMem above 4GB?? Don't know.

Is the controller enabled in your bios? You can disable the controller.

I don't run HighMem, but I run a 2Gb process size/2Gb user adressable patch in the kernel.

I ran some debug. It seems it fails here:

FT_VIR = (unchar *) __get_free_pages(GFP_ATOMIC,PowerOfVIR); // 2MB
FT_PHY = (unchar *) __get_free_pages(GFP_ATOMIC,PowerOfPHY); // 512KB

both those gets NULL back. I have no idea what __get_free_pages does... It's not defined in the source. It's possibly some part of the kernel, hopefully not from ftlib.o.

I'll reboot later (I have a week uptime) and see if it gets any better.

Promise RAID Driver.
 

Then I'm afraid is has something to do with this patch that it doesn't work the way it is supposed to work. Could you try what happens if you remove this patch?

Jan Hugo

Reading the description of __get_free_pages, it seems like it needs contagious pages of memory. There probably isn't much chance of 2Mb free contagious memory when the system has been up for more then a week... Well, now I'll reboot and try again. :-)

After reboot, I got this:
Jul 9 12:41:54 orchid kernel: PROMISE FastTrak TX4000/376/378/S150 TX Series Linux Driver Version 1.00.0.15
Jul 9 12:41:54 orchid kernel: ft3xx: The driver doesn't support SATA 378
Jul 9 12:41:54 orchid kernel: ft3xx: No valid controller detected

Did you turn off SATA in BIOS or something? I don't have any SATA connected, I just want the P-ATA controller working...

Bios setting.
 

I really don't know, can't check that at the moment. But I haven't connected anything to this controller yet.

JH

Yay, I had the controller set for IDE, not RAID.
With it set to RAID the module loads (well, once it hanged my computer but the other two times it worked).

Only, now it says:

Jul 9 22:19:18 orchid kernel: FastTrak initialize ...
Jul 9 22:19:19 orchid kernel: ft3xx: DEV(5) ATA CMD(c8) retry .....
...
Jul 9 22:19:27 orchid kernel: ft3xx: camATAReturn Error (5/c8/05/80/fd/00)
Jul 9 22:19:27 orchid kernel: ft3xx: SOFT_RESET(Ch3) OK
...
Jul 9 22:19:39 orchid kernel: ft3xx: DEV(6) ATA CMD(c8) retry .....
...
Jul 9 22:19:43 orchid kernel: ft3xx: camATAReturn Error (6/c8/05/80/fd/00)
Jul 9 22:19:43 orchid kernel: ft3xx: SOFT_RESET(Ch3) OK
Jul 9 22:19:44 orchid kernel: FastTrak initialize ...
Jul 9 22:19:46 orchid kernel: FastTrak initialize ...
Jul 9 22:19:48 orchid kernel: scsi1 : ft3xx


and hangs the computer for seconds while probing. That can't be too good.

Also, I can't seem to find any device to mount...

But /proc/scsi/ft3xx/1 looks good:

PROMISE FastTrak TX4000/376/378/S150 TX Series Linux Driver Version 1.00.0.15
Adapter1 - FastTrak 378
Array Drive -
5 : IC35L080AVVA07-0 IDE3/Master 82348MB IRQ(11) UDMA5 Free
6 : ST380021A IDE3/Slave 80026MB IRQ(11) UDMA5 Free

First actual succes?
 

So, it seems that at least the driver works for some part but is not completly reliable yet. At the moment I don't have the possibilities to do some testing as well because I simply don't have the extra drives at the moment.

I have send a message to Promise asking them to release newer versions of these drivers and to consider releasing them more often in this manner. Maybe you could do the same and also send them your experience with this driver.

JH

I wrote to them earlier, but they didn't want anything to do with drivers for embedded chips. They only support their own cards (think PCI), and they didn't seem to want to have anything to do with me. :(

Oh, and Asus never even bothered with a reply.

Fasttrak drivers
 

I have also been trying the get the Fasttrak drivers to work. I emailed promise and they claim to be releasing an Open Source driver on August 15th. They sent the work in progress source to me which I have been looking at for the last three weeks.

So far I have tried compiling them on a Mandrake 9.1 SMP and a SuSE 8.2 single CPU system. Each time I get unresolved symbols.

On SuSE 8.2 I just get an unresolved symbol "schedule". It appears as if the SuSE source has had a patch applied to the default 2.4.20 source which changes the function exported in sched.h to "do_schedule". This is new since SuSE 8.0. I need to find a way to get the driver linking to this function but since this is my first dabble with kernel source I am a little lost as to how to start. I have patched, compiled and configured kernels before but that is the extent of my experience. If anyone could offer any assistance it would be appreciated. That way I could begin debugging and hopefully help out with this.

One thing I will add is that the source appears to pull in numerous headers that it appears to not need (unless I understand less that I thought).

BTW the 8.0 and 8.1 kernel modules work great for SUSE (sadly my graphics card doesn't) so I find it hard to believe it can be that hard to get it working with 8.2. Ahh blind optimism hey ;)

Just got a new PC, itching to get a good OS on it.

BTW my FastTrak controller is a 20376 which also claims to be supported by this driver.

Cheers for any help.

Stuart

I solved with this driver: http://www.antgel.co.uk/compsci/linu...ise_raid.shtml

Compiled it on my Mandrake 9.1 but cannot load it as kernel module at startup (as someone said here). Anyway doing from shell:

insmod ft3xx.o

and then:

cat /proc/scsi/ft3xx/1

i was able to see the array:

PROMISE FastTrak TX4000/376/378/S150 TX Series Linux Driver Version 1.00.0.15
Adapter1 - FastTrak 376
Array - Array[1] : 1+0 Stripe (OK)
Drive -
5 : Maxtor 6Y120L0 IDE3/Master 122941MB IRQ(11) UDMA6 Array[1]

anyway i was not able to mount the partition...
Solved it doing a:

makedev sd\*

now i have sda1 in my /dev direcotry :D

doing a simple:

mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/sata

i was able to access the data :D

OK: found the way to load it at boot :)

- compile the module whit these sources: http://www.antgel.co.uk/compsci/linu...ise_raid.shtml

- copy ft3xx.o in /lib/modules/your_version_here/kernel/drivers/scsi

- add these lines in /etc/modules:

scsi_mod
sd_mod
ft3xx

- reboot the system

At boot you will receive an 'unresolved symbols' when finding modules dependencies but the process will anyway give you an OK because you loaded the necessary modules in /etc/modules

Now that the system booted:

- open a shell as root and do: makedev sd\*

Now you have your sda devices in /dev, just add the necessary entries in /etc/fstab to mount partitions at boot.

Hi...I've just got a new computer and the specs are:
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe
Intel P4 2,6Ghz, 800 fsb
Corsair 512mb DDR-RAM (2x256)
WD Raptor 36,7gb SATA
WD Caviar 120gb SATA
Sappire Radeon 9500
---
I think thats all the relevant.
---
I've tried RedHat, Debian and Gentoo but none of the works correcly. The error messages tells me that it is something wrong with the "SATA stuff". The error message for gentoo is 'ide1 at 0x17 0-0x177,0x376 on irq 15' and comes before i've even had a chance to install it. I want to install gentoo and make everything work correcly. Please help me anyone. I need "something" to make SATA work. :cry:

I compiled gentoo 10 times and no results on an Asus P4PE, anyway for your board look here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5&pagenumber=3

I don't understand. Will the Promise RAID thing make SATA work correcly?

i875 and AGP support
 

Hi,

I have a P4C800 motherboard + Radeon 9700Pro videocard, and my distribution is Mandrake 9.1. I was able to get AGP support by passing the following argument to the agpgart module: "agp_try_unsupported=1", i.e.:
modprobe agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1
To enable agp support at boot, I added the line "agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1" to the file /etc/modules.

Then, I installed the appropriate fireglx driver (available from http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati.html). I kept the default parameters when running fglrxconfig, except that I choose to use the external AGP GART module when asked.

Now, 3D hardware acceleration seems to work very nicely: gl gears ~ 480 fps (full screen), ~ 3000 fps (window) and Unreal Tournament 2003 demo rocks!

I hope this is useful.
A.

sata raid
 

I've RH 9.0.

Everything works but I'm now unable to run lilo.
It says :
Fatal: Device 0x0801: Maximum number of sectors is 63, not 194

What's wrong ????????

I have the files SuSE8.2 ft3xx.o driver on my personal webserver.
I don't know if it will work with any other flavour of Linux, but SuSE8.2 is a 2.4.20 Kernel.

is that driver for ...-20 kernel or ...-18.

I have the one for -18.

But I've found "detour" and now it works ..

Most confusing.
:confused:
It is what I said it is. A driver for SuSE8.2 which is a 2.4.20 Kernel.
Not -18 or anything else.
I can't say if it will work for RedHat or any other Linux flavour, but if you rag the Promise people as bad as I did maybe they will send you one by return as well.

I have no idea what "detour" is, but I'm glad it works for you.

:D

Hi,
I tried the driver on Suse 8.2 to install. Install goes great until i reboot and select linux from lilo. then he starts to boot and to mount boot filesystem and all of a sudden I get:
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mouunt root fs on 08:0a :scratch:
My Hardware is:
Chaintech zenith(nforce2 chip)
Integrated Prommise fasttrack 376 with 3 WD1200?? hd's(total of 360GB)

Pls advice me i am a :newbie: in this

Hi all,
The Asus site pointed out in the e-mail by Mark Bilk no
longer has the Linux stuff. If you want this you have to go to
the global site located at:
http://www.asus.com/index.htm
choose one of the boards on the righthand side and then click
on download.
The erase of the Linux stuff maybe because of the ACE action
on its stupid copyright claim.
JA

So it's time to no longer support Asus. Are the other manufacturers better (Abit, MSI, DFI, Intel)?