Bug#524643: closed by Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> (Re: linux-2.6: enabling APIC on Asus M3A78 Pro motherboard causes disk i/o problems and corruption)

[Arthur Marsh <arthur.marsh@internode.on.net>]

Just for anyone's interest, the problem was caused by not 
clearing/resetting the BIOS settings after upgrading the BIOS.

Regards,

Arthur.

Debian Bug Tracking System wrote, on 01/06/09 07:42:
> This is an automatic notification regarding your Bug report
> which was filed against the linux-2.6 package:
>
> #524643: linux-2.6: enabling APIC on Asus M3A78 Pro motherboard causes disk i/o problems and corruption
>
> It has been closed by Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>.
...
> Subject:
> Re: linux-2.6: enabling APIC on Asus M3A78 Pro motherboard causes disk 
> i/o problems and corruption
> From:
> Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
> Date:
> Sun, 31 May 2009 23:07:50 +0100
> To:
> 524643-done@bugs.debian.org
>
> To:
> 524643-done@bugs.debian.org
>
>
> I seem to remember that we discussed this bug on IRC, but the
> conclusions were not recorded here.  However, my understanding is that
> these problems resulted from enabling APIC in the kernel while disabling
> it in the BIOS.  This is considered to be misconfiguration and not a
> kernel bug.
>
> Ben.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> linux-2.6: enabling APIC on Asus M3A78 Pro motherboard causes disk i/o 
> problems and corruption
> From:
> Arthur Marsh <arthur.marsh@internode.on.net>
> Date:
> Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:20:01 +0930
> To:
> Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>
>
> To:
> Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>
>
>
> Package: linux-2.6
> Severity: normal
>
>
> I recently purchase a pc with a dual-core AMD64 cpu and Asus M3A78 Pro
> motherboard.
>
> I experienced very poor disk i/o performance and filesystem corruption when
> I enabled the BIOS option ACPI APIC Support, to the extent that an ext3
> filesystem had unrecoverable errors.
>
> The BIOS manual describes the option: 
>
> "ACPI APIC Support" When set to enabled, the ACPI APIC table pointer is 
> included in the RSDT pointer list.
>
> Since I've disabled "ACPI APIC Support" I have had no hard disk i/o problems,
> but since the patch http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/1473/ has been applied
> to the kernel source, the kernel has disabled the use of the second CPU core.
>
> I've backed out that patch and recompiled the kernel to make both CPU cores
> available, but would rather a fix that doesn't require manually patching
> the kernel source.
>
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: squeeze/sid
>   APT prefers unstable
>   APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
> Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
>
> Kernel: Linux 2.6.29 (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
> Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash