Re: ABIT BH6 problems

Harald Koenig (koenig@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de)
Wed, 21 Jul 1999 10:34:08 +0200


On Jul 21, Peter Desnoyers wrote:

> M.Brands wrote:
> >
> > Some S3 videocards are notorious when it comes to system crashes (the S3 ViRGE
> > for instance). Maybe you trigger a bug in their hardware?
>
> A number of S3 cards lie about their PCI memory usage, and actually decode
> twice as much memory (an extra bit) than the BIOS thinks they do. This
> is worked around by Windows 95 drivers which go and muck with PCI bus
> allocations at driver load time.

only S3 868 and 968 chips have this bug. XFree86 S3 server does fix the bad
PCI allocation, and without X you won't enable/use the newmmio mapping anyway.

> This has caused us no end of problems with our hardware under Windows NT,
> which like Linux tends not to touch the BIOS allocation. Our standard
> support solution is to swap cards in the bus to cause the S3 card to be
> enumerated either first or last (I forget - it's late...) so that the
> invisible upper half of its address space doesn't step on any other PCI
> allocations.

this won't work e.g. with scsi-chips on the main board.

Harald

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