Vakkotaur

About three years ago my aging & rather ancient computer well and truly died. I shopped around some and settled on a few things. One was a Gigabyte motherboard, the GA-890XA-UD3 which I am using right now as I type. It has worked just fine for these last three years with no special setup beyond updating the BIOS (for which having a lowly Sempron around is a Good Thing). The only thing it really lacks is an AM3+ socket so unless I upgrade the motherboard, I can't upgrade the CPU. And thus the (mis)adventure begins...

Last year I was building up a machine for scarletcharnel and selected another Gigabyte motherboard, the GA-990FXA-UD3, which had about everything, including USB3 and an AM3+ socket and that just worked. I didn't even need to update the BIOS. This was Rev 1.1 which as far as I know is just fine. If there is a heat/throttling issue, it's hasn't shown up. That system has great ventilation and cooling.

Thus I felt fairly safe ordering another GA-990FXA-UD3 board for myself, to upgrade belgian or at least allow upgrades (new case case with more ventilation/fans, new video card, eventually a newer CPU, and maybe more RAM). Alas, that was not the case. I tried moving everything at once and things got seriously weird. Lost trackball and keyboard, unless I plugged them into USB3 ports. Lost networking. Once, in a diagnostic boot of RIP Linux, USB2 worked but USB3 didn't - and there was no indication of why. Network worked then, but only just then. I moved everything back to get a working system, then swapped out video cards and had no issue.[1]

My next night off was spent trying again, this time with the Sempron that jmaynard had been using for something, a couple 1 GB DIMMs of DDR3 1333 (instead of four 4 GB DIMMs of DDR3 1600), the GTX 570 (which was replaced by a GTX 760 [2] in the working belgian) and a LiveCD. And everything just worked. What the heck was going on? But I knew that the hardware could work and the board was not automatically bad. Everything also worked fine in BIOS setup screens and such[3].

So I figured I'd try a part by part move and see what happened. Moving RAM should be the most trivial, uneventful thing, right? WRONG. Well, right, it SHOULD be that way. It wasn't. I pulled the 2 GB of 1333 and put in the 16 GB of 1600 and the problem(s) reappeared. What the photon? Dropped to 8 GB (2 DIMMs). Problems. Swapped those two for the other two. Problems. Tried the other two sockets. Problems. Tried only 1 DIMM (4 GB). Problems. Tried slowing the timing to 1333, and even to 1066. Problems. Tried upping the RAM voltage a bit. Problems. Put everything back to AUTO and put the 1333 back in and things worked. Put the 16 GB back in the working belgian and that works.

Looking at things, it feels eerily like the bad old days of IRQ conflicts and the weird breakages that resulted. Turns out that was what was going on.

I pulled a DIMM (8 GB) from the machine that had the Sempron and try that, so I can keep my main system working until I figure things out - or return the board. Eventually I find online that there is a setting for IOMMU that is DISABLED, but switching to ENABLED makes things work - for some. Not for me. More delays and more research and I finally find someone who had the same problem that enabling IOMMU didn't fix. But he had a solution: tell the kernel "iommu=soft" at boot time. Aha! That makes everything work. USB2 works. USB3 works (the ports work, I might need to confirm USB3 speeds rather than USB2 fallback), and the network is there and working.

What is IOMMU? Input-Output Memory Management Unit. The thingie that is supposed to prevent IRQ conflict issues in this modern, enlightened Plug & Play age. Somehow, in Rev 4.0 of this board or the BIOS, Gigabyte managed to break it in a way that Linux detection can't (yet) detect automatically compensate for. And what happened, exactly? I don't know all the true low-level details, but below 3 GB of RAM, IOMMU doesn't seem to matter very much. Thus running on only 2 GB or only mucking about in BIOS screens, all was well. Above 3 GB (I tested with 4, 8, and 16... all more than 3) it's needed. But if it isn't working quite right, there are problems anyway. The kernel message is sort of "Assume IOMMU is messed up and compensate for that."

I hope that's the only issue with this board. In my research I found that it can, now, supposedly even take the new AMD factory-overclocked (and crazy hot, power hungry) FX95XX CPUs that are rated at a staggering 220 Watts instead of a "mere" 125 Watts. I have exactly zero plans to use such a thing, but I could. That would seem to indicate any power issues (Rev 3.0 has tales of woe regarding such) have been resolved. Still, the IOMMU screwiness makes me wonder if anything else is messed up. I had been at the point of considering only Gigabyte boards[4] since I had some weirdness with an (admittedly cheap, open box) ASRock board and Jay had something a bit odd (but since forgotten, so evidently not critical) about an MSI board. Now? Now the next time I go motherboard shopping, I probably won't be gravitating to Gigabyte. Not sure what way I will go, but I really do not need this time-sink of a headache that makes me think of the bad old days of twenty years ago[5].

A few days ago I started having computer problems that were not purely software related. One piece of software which is rather demanding of the video system seemed to cause a hard crash as I could only run it for a few minutes. Yet I could run everything else for hours. But previously I did not have that problem so something was wrong. I had heard an odd fan noise a bit earlier and so started looking at the fans.

The first time I looked the case fan was operating, the power supply fan was operating but the supply was hot rather than just warm, the CPU fan and the video card fan were also operating. A day or so later with things worse I found the problem. The power supply had two fans. One wasn't moving, the other was only barely moving. I shut things down and used a different computer as well as jmaynard's eeePC.

A couple days of using the eeePC convinced me that I would not be replacing the laptop(s) with a netbook as I had pondered doing. The thing is rather underpowered (as expected) and the keyboard is only almost big enough to not be frustrating.

Monday we went to Mankato and I bought a replacement power supply, which I am now using. We also decided to take a look at what laptops might be had. The kicker is that I need a non-intel graphics chipset since I now want very good graphic performance under Linux and intel graphics simply won't cut it. The first time I looked around I got sticker shock as the only things I saw that fit were in the $1,200+ range. But this time we saw a few things in the $600+ range. Combined with Best Buy's (yeah, but it was really the only choice) 18-month interest-free financing it got seriously tempting. After looking at three different models I rejected the GateWay with the Turion not (just) for being a GateWay or the Turion but mainly from poor keyboard layout. The process repeated and after much questions and electronic forms being filled out, I now have a Toshiba Satellite L675. That's an AMD Phenom II X2 (dual core 64 bit) at 2.9 GHz, with 4GB RAM and a 500 GB HDD. And ATI Radeon 4250 graphics. And Windows Home Premium, which I plan to use very little. Oh, and a big beautiful 17.3 inch 1600 x 900 pixel screen. And a keyboard that is Not Tiny.

I've used it only briefly so far. Just a bit of setup and making the 4 DVD set (yowza!) of recovery discs. I know I have some issues to resolve, such as if I should go with a 32 or 64 bit Linux distribution and if 64, which one. Also, transporting this thing will require something other than the laptop bag I've been using. The L675 is too big to fit in that bag - and I probably want it better protected anyway should I actually travel with it.

...but it can be made more tolerable than it is "out of the box."

Generally when I find I need some application for Windows, the first place I look is TinyApps which has links to programs that are for DOS or Window(95/98/NT/2k/XP) and small enough to fit on a floppy. Even if floppies are fading into history, it's a nice measurement. A small program doesn't take up much space, probably doesn't take up much memory, and has fewer places for bugs to hide. Also, small is beautiful - generally there isn't anything unnecessary, like ugly style-breaking default skins.

I had need of a stopwatch today. Looking at TinyApps (under Misc) I found a simple timer. There was also a simple calendar. Something I've gotten used to on Linux is being able to click on the clock and get a simple calendar that I can flip through the months. No scheduling or anything, it just shows me the days of the month(s). It sounds trivial, but it's one of those little things a person starts to just expect. So on Windows it's annoying when it's not there. I don't have it exactly as on Linux, but now there is a calendar icon next to the clock. And now XP is just that little bit more tolerable.

The BBC is reporting survey results that indicate many people would be willing to reveal a password for a chocolate bar. Generally people don't like passwords unless they see a need themselves. And they really don't like having to have a bunch of different passwords, and then have to change them constantly. It gets to be hard to keep track.

I have a story of a couple passwords, now long expired and not re-used in case anyone is wondering. It started when a fellow at work left to go work for someone else. The stuff on his computer was backed up, but backup tapes are notoriously poor, so it was decided to keep his computer around and not have it immediately wiped and re-used elsewhere.

But to prevent someone overzealous with re-use mucking things up, Gene, who would need the data most, decided to put a BIOS password on. This is defeatable, but it means popping the case and therefore might get someone to think that maybe there's a reason that that password is there. On this system, two passwords were possible and he wanted to use them both.

I was asked, since I was in the room (the fellow who left and I had shared the room), what passwords might be good. I jokingly suggested "goaway" ala Slappy Squirrel for the first, and then "byebye" for the second. To my surprise, Gene used these suggestions.

All was fine for a few weeks. Every once in a while Gene would boot the computer and check something or copy something off. But eventually someone else had to check on something. Brian came in and tried to boot it and ran into the password screen. By then, I think I'd forgotten the passwords since I'd didn't need to use that computer and so didn't use the passwords regularly. I told Brian that Gene knew what the passwords were.

Brian phones Genes and asks about the passwords. Gene tells him. And Brian wonders why he was so rude. Gene had related the passwords without any explanation and Brian heard, "Go away. Bye Bye." A short walk to meet face to face cleared things up. Gene later accused me of setting him up. It wasn't a setup, at least not intentionally. I just suggested those passwords because it amused me at the time. I hadn't expected the results they eventually got.