These issues are related to:
– CPU bugs
– Motherboard electrical bugs
– AGP/PCI Chipset hardware bugs
– Video hardware bugs
– Device driver bugs
http://www.daniel.nofftz.net/linux/Athlon-Powersaving-HOWTO.html
VIA and ATI chipsets AGP 3.0 AGP cycles to system memory do not work properly and cause memory corruption.
GA-6BX board has a 5A regulator instead of the 6A required by AGP specification, resulting in low voltage on the 3.3V power supply, crashing video cards which do not have their own power circuits.
AMD Irongate (AMD751) must be used in 1X mode with certain NVIDIA video cards. It is also possible for a Savage4 card to hang the AMD751 under specific circumstances unless . (http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/22564.pdf)
ALI 1541, 1647 is incompatible with G200's 2x AGP and must be run in 1X. NVIDIA disables AGP for ALI chipsets.
The condition where an Aureal A3D chip did not get a bus grant within a 4us (16 PCI clocks) window on a MMIO read causes a system lockup. (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd/msg/f4d69e1b45a054f7?dmode=source&hl=en)
Windows SBLive drivers constantly transfer data to the sound card when MIDI is enabled, even when no sound is being played, reducing the available bandwidth. (http://alive.singnet.com.sg/tech/via.htm)
Athlon north bridges can be programmed to disconnect the CPU when Stop Grant is asserted (a result of HLT instruction called during OS idle loop, or of south bridge asserting STPCLK as a result of ACPI), resulting in very good power saving and cooling. The BIOS vendors do not seem to program the appropriate bits in the north bridge, so the user can do it himself. There can be problems with this though. Disconnecting and reconnecting the processor bus adds latency and reduces bandwidth. It also may fail on Athlon Model 4 (Thunderbird) due to two errata involving the CPU multiplier and the CLK_CTRL MSR. (http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/23614.pdf). Some AMD751 chipsets seem to have a problem with incomplete processor disconnects that cause hangs (http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/22564.pdf). Doing this behind the BIOS's back may also conflict with the BIOS ACPI implementation. The local APIC timer may also have problem.
Athlon Model 1/2 (slot) resume from suspend may fail due to L2 cache corruption on specific processors (errata). BIOS needs to check for this condition and leave L2 cache enabled at suspend.
VIA bugs
VIA chipsets are frequently relabeled. Some relabeled VIA chipsets are AMD-640 (VP2/97), Soyo ETEQ (MVP3), VIAgra (MVP4), etc. (http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/printpage/59/1)
A chipset such as Via Apollo Pro VPX is a set of chips under a product name (VT82C580VPX), such as the north bridge (CPU to AGP/PCI) and south bridge (PCI to ISA, some have integrated super I/O). A product name integrates a set of north bridge, south bridge and data buffers.
| Name | Product name | North bridge | NB PCI ID | South bridge | SB PCI ID | IDE controller PCI ID |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo VP (VX Pro) | VT82C580VP | VT82C585VP | 0x585 | VT82C586 | 0x586 | 0x571 |
| Apollo VPX (VX Pro+) | VT82C580VPX | VT82C585VPX | 0x585 | VT82C586B | 0x586 | 0x571 |
| Apollo VP3 | VT82C597 | VT82C597 | 0x597 | VT82C586B | 0x586 | 0x571 |
| Apollo MVP3 | VT82C598 | VT82C598[AT|MVP] | 0x598 | VT82C586B/VT82C596B/VT82C686A | 0x586/0x596/0x686 | 0x571 |
VT82C598MVP revision 'CD' (made as late as 9821) seems to have some compatibility problems with certain AGP video cards (like Intel i740). Revision 'CE' (made as early as 9825) seem to fix this, and FIC also produced a BIOS update that claimed to fix it.
VT82C597 only supports AGP 1.0.
586A does not support ACPI, 586B does.
The combination of SBLive, PCI 2.1 Delayed Transaction, and VIA 686B seems to cause data corruption when transferring between the 686B IDE channels in DMA mode. (http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT042501034500) (http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT051401003409) (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/2003-May/000329.html) (http://web.archive.org/web/20010831022614/http://www.viahardware.com/686b_1.shtm)
VIA 691 (Apollo Pro), 693 (Apollo Pro Plus), 693A (Apollo Pro 133) and 694X (Apollo Pro 133A) all share the same PCI ID. 694X supports AGP 4X similar to KX133, but NVIDIA uses 2X AGP on 694X and KX133.
Many VIA PCI-ISA (and VLB-ISA) bridges have a bug that causes frequent ISA DMA transactions to hang the board. Intel 430FX (Triton) may suffer from the same bug.
Some instability problems with Western Digital hard disk drivers on VIA VPX/97, VP2/97-based boards using UDMA mode were reported. WD agreed to workaround their firmware to fix this incompatibility in future releases of their products. VIA will also adress this issue in the next release of BusMaster drive (v. 2.13 has not implemented this fix and for v. 2.19 (not approved yet) it will be known after lab tests are finished). Temporary solutions: a) disable UDMA, or b) disable 586B ISA refresh option (RX41 bit 0 set to 1, disable ISA refresh but Port 61 still Toggle) WD releases Tucson CCC:C2 and Sedona CCC:B2 and later have updated firmware that solves the problem implemented. There have been no reports on problems for disks shipped after November 1997. In case you suspect your HDD has been affected by this, check your HDD firmware version.
PCI bridge performance
Several generic performance options can be set in order to speed up PCI operations. The locations differ per PCI chipset, and should be set up by BIOS, but on many systems are not. L2 cache as write-back instead of write-through, PCI posting (from CPU to memory, CPU to PCI, and PCI to memory), and PCI burst transfers are all helpful. Linux used to set these up in pci/quirks.c but no longer.