Re: VIA silent disk corruption - patch

[Peter Horton]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 08:52:23AM -0700, Dale Farnsworth wrote:
> 
> In article <[e-mail]>,
> Peter Horton <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > +      *  VIA VT8363 host bridge has broken feature 'PCI Master Read
> > +      *  Caching'. It caches more than is good for it, sometimes
> > +      *  serving the bus master with stale data. Some BIOSes enable
> > +      *  it by default, so we disable it.
> 
> Another data point:
> 
> I have an ASUS A7V motherboard with via vt82c686a and Promise pdc20265
> IDE controllers.  I noticed disk data corruption when I enabled DMA.     
> The corrupted data was 4K bytes long on 4K byte boundaries and occurred
> about once for every couple of gigabytes copied via cpio.
> I saw this corruption when the disks were connected to the pdc20265
> as well as to the 686a.    
> 
> I also noticed that turning off read caching eliminated the corruption.
> 
> However, if I enable the BIOS parameter "I/O Recovery Time", I can still
> enable read caching without seeing any data corruption.
> The lastest BIOS revision (1005C) enables "I/O Recovery Time" by default
> where the previous revision I had (1004D) did not.
> 

I still get corruption with "I/O Recovery Time" enabled :-(

I don't get corruption with the BIOS "normal" settings (1004D).

I might update my BIOS to the latest BIOS in case it changes any other
settings.

P.