[SOLVED] Problem with new ALIX.1E motherboard

[Sitas]

Hello,

I'm using an "old" puppy linux distro (4.1.2 basix) on ALIX motherboard since many years now. It's AMD Geode Motherboard with integrated RAM, Ethernet, and VGA chipsets.

Recently, ALIX switches from Alix.1D to Alix.1E motherbord model. They are claiming it's just a minor improvement of their motherboard.

My problem is the following : since 1E models Puppy doesn't see integrated network adapter anymore (as well as USB devices).

I tried to install a more recent version of Puppy (Wary and Slacko and Lucid) with no more sucess...

I finaly decided (I don't really know why !) to plug a network card to the pci slot and... it works ! Both (external "new" network pci card and internal network) and also USB interfaces are working again. So, I did all settings for the network, stopped the system, unpluged pci network card and restarted the system... and, again the network (and USB) was down.

So, when the PCI network card is plugged (with or without network cable plug in) everything is just fine (like with ALIX.1D) and when there is no PCI network card both network and USB are not working.

It's not making sence for me... if someone has a clue to understand what appends here and if there is something to do to avoid to plug a network card I will not use...

Thanks a lot for this forum and for sharing so many precious advices.

[tempestuous]

It sounds like a hardware resource allocation issue - I suspect your 1e's bios is not playing well with the Puppy kernel.
When you plug in an additional PCI device, the resource allocations (IRQ & DMA) are reshuffled, and everything then works.

Get into the 1e's bios and see if you can change things. Bios's will traditionally have something like "PnP OS = YES/NO" for which the best setting, in theory, is "NO". That forces the bios to set resource allocation, instead of the operating system.
But whatever you find, change it, reboot, and test.

[Sitas]

Many thx Tempestuous for your answer.

I tried your trick this morning with no success (by the way, the PnP entry was already set to "NO", I tried "YES" and back to "NO")

I tried an other distro (named crunchbang) and everything is fine with it.

I tried to restart the network script after boot ("/etc/rc.d/rc.network eth0 restart" command line) without any more success. I'm affraid to be resignated to be forced to plug something on PCI slot to get my Puppy Linux in usual working state.

[tempestuous]

Check the output of "dmesg" and you will probably see errors relating to PCI allocation ... and possibly also errors relating to acpi.
In both cases, these are likely to be solved by adding boot options, which affects the behaviour of the kernel.
The best boot option to try is -

pci=biosirq

But there are similar boot options you should also try -

acpi=noirq
acpi=strict
pci=nosort
irqpoll routeirq

[Sitas]

Yep ! You got it Tempestuous.

The irqpoll routeirq flag did the job.

For those who have the same problem and would want a little bit more precise info : I changed the file named "extlinux.conf" (I simply added "irqpoll routeirq" at the end of the boot line in it)

Again thanks a lot Tempestuous.