VIA 8235 and 686 UDMA ICRC errors

[Yura Socolov]

Does anyone else have a problem lately with VIA-based motherboards and relatively
big IDE harddrives?

In particular, any combination of the following gives me a load of UDMA ICRC 
errors of various kinds, sometimes random panics (during boot or 20 minutes later), 
corrupted filesystems, etc.

I have tried using two different 160G hard drives from two different vendors 
(maxtor and samsung), on three different, VIA-based motherboards of various
age and from 3 different manufacturers (asus, shuttle, fic), using either VIA 
686 or VIA 8235 chip, three different cables (so it's not a cable problem). 
DDR and PC133 memory as needed. FreeBSD versions from 5.2, to 5.2.1, -stable as 
of yesterday and about three weeks ago, and now compiling -current to check it out.

If the drive is put in the BIOSPIO mode, everything works just dandy, including
under heavy load on any of the boards. Under DMA100 i see ICRC errors as soon as
there is more or less noticeable activity on the drive. For instance installing 
from CD causes an immediate error, installing from ftp at about 300 Kbytes/sec 
manages to survive, sometimes to the end of the minimalistic install process.

If any of these drives are put in an amd64 box with FIC K8-800T (VIA 8237 chip),
everything works flawlessly even under heavy load...

I did see one similar bug report from last year in the non-urgent category, with no
followups. Not sure if it's related, though, and I would call this more of a 
critical problem,  since installation of FreeBSD on these kinds of systems is 
currently just not possible.

Any pointers would be appreciated. Please cc: any replies to me, as i'm not on 
the list.

Thank you for your time.

-- Yura Socolov <nospam>                   FP: A7192ABD96E15F5 19AB21E60C34109
--                                               http://users.binary.net/yura/
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