Re: Compact Flash (CF) boot question

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 2:28 AM, Emanoil Kotsev <deloptes@yahoo.com> wrote:

Bob wrote:

> Emanoil Kotsev wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have a fanless board by Acrosser with Geode GX CPU. The board has a CF
>> slot that is seen as primary/secondary HDD in Bios. I've jumpered to
>> primary as I don't have a HDD attached. The card is a CF card (hda: ELITE
>> PRO CF CARD 4GB, ATA DISK drive).
>> Now the problem is that the system can not boot from this card. Can
>> someone tell me how to debug, please.
>> I'm thinking that may be the bios is not supporting such a big CF card.
>>
>> The other think is that when I boot from USB or other drive I have this
>> following error couple of times after that the CF card is mounted:
>>
>> Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver
>> cs5535 0000:00:0f.2: IDE controller (0x100b:0x002d rev 0x00)
>> cs5535 0000:00:0f.2: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
>> ide0: BM-DMA at 0xff00-0xff07
>> Probing IDE interface ide0...
>> hda: ELITE PRO CF CARD 4GB, ATA DISK drive
>> hda: host max PIO4 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO2
>> hda: host side 80-wire cable detection failed, limiting max speed to
>> UDMA33 hda: UDMA/33 mode selected
>> ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
>> hda: max request size: 128KiB
>> hda: 7831152 sectors (4009 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=7769/16/63
>> hda:<4>hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
>> hda: DMA timeout error
>> hda: dma timeout error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest
>> } ide: failed opcode was: unknown
>> hda: DMA disabled
>> ide0: reset: success
>> hda1 hda2 hda3
>>
>> There was an option to pass CHS on the command line at boot time, but I'm
>> not quite sure what the root cause is. I'm using kernel 2.6.26.2 or
>> 2.6.27.6, but same behaviour with both except that with 2.6.27 I can not
>> boot some times (it hangs after reading the intrd file).
>>
>> Thank you in advance
>>
>> regards
>>
>
> Mmm I've done CF boot a few times but not recently, I seem to remember
> that some (most) CF cards or CF->IDE adapters don't play well with DMA.
>
> Try putting it in PIO mode in BIOS and there'll be a boot parameter like
> ide=nodma you can pass to lock the kernel to PIO but how would depend on
> which boot loader you're using.
>
> Sorry I can't be more help, Good luck

Thanks a lot, precious help, I went to BIOS -> Peripherals -> IDE and
disabled DMA.
The CF disk boots now. My kernel still hangs after loading initrd from time
to time.
Do you know how I can debug this. It happens more often with 2.6.27 and not
that often with 2.6.26

I'm running Debian Etch on a system with an ECS EVEm motherboard and booting from a Compact Flash drive connected via a CF-to-IDE card.

I don't remember where I read it, but I think you can't pass ide=nodma to the kernel. You must add a module (and I can't remember what module it is) and then you don't have to pass that boot parameter.

I still get those DMA errors in the boot sequence, but the system eventually does boot. It just takes longer. Since I leave it on all the time and Etch is so bug-free on this hardware, I have no problems with this setup.