Al Hoang

I built myself a Core 2 Duo system recently with the hopes of running

a much faster Linux setup than my old Athlon setup. However, what I ran

fast into were compatibility issues. It seems that the JMicron chipset

which is present in the MSI P965 Neo motherboard that I own is the culprit

of many problems

[1],

[2],

[3],

[4]

A workaround which is to install Gentoo (Ubuntu Dapper

folks does NOT work at this time) or some other distro besides

Ubuntu and make sure to

boot sending the kernel parameters all-generic-ide and

irqpoll to make sure that the kernel does not completely bork itself

on bootup. After that, you STILL have an issue with the Gigabit NIC that

is included onboard. And NO, it is NOT in 2.6.17.x kernels or less. In

fact you have to download the stupid thing from Realtek’s website (HELLO,

have we heard of merging into the kernel??) which can be found

here.

Just for note, the 2.6.17-suspend-r4 kernel that I used with Gentoo does

seem to cause some issues with the Realtek driver. I had to tweak some

settings in the header files for the Realtek driver to get it to compile

however I’m noticing that it is now causing OOPSes in ‘dmesg’ when I try

to load the driver. These OOPsies are causing issues since the NIC

refuses to come up during these problems.

Fixing it

Wait.. as usual for some patches to roll in. At the current moment it

seems that the fixes for the JMicron are in 2.6.18-mm or something branch

and will hopefully make it into the 2.6.18 release.

Glad to know in 2006, device driver issues still plague Linux. Perhaps

one day, everyone will just submit patches into the mainline kernel and

will eventually be synced up so people will just have ‘working’ drivers

for their desktops but perhaps that’s being too wishful

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