[ale] BIOS caching control question

John M. Mills jmills at jmills.gtri.gatech.edu
Thu Sep 11 10:54:57 EDT 1997


Hello -- still struggling to get the new motherboard (FCI2007 PCI), CPU
(Cyrix 6x86-166 at 133 MHz), and video (Path 411 - Trio64V [86C765])
playing.  I couldn't get XFree86 3.1 to run 'till I removed the 'Chipset'
entry in XF86Config, then it started nicely, _once_.  (I know I need to
upgrade XFree.)  I then tried an older XFree server in an a.out
configuration, and it locked the box.  Thereafter, the 3.1 S3 server
locked the box, until I trashed the file system when forced to drop power
on the runing box.

Symptoms:  'startx' finds the chip and ramdac ("s3_generic") and the
screen goes blank, and stays that way.  Fiddling with <CTRL><ALT>F1
eventually gives a flash of the X screen, then a live vtty.  Fiddling with
<CTRL><ALT>F7 eventually gives the X window, but keyboard (including
<CTRL><ALT><everything> and mouse are dead.  At this point I had to drop
power.  This behavior was repeatable (till I trashed a superblock :-).

Questions: Can this be related to cache pages enabled on my board, or some
other setup feature anyone can think of?  What is the relation (if any)
between the cache pages I enable in the BIOS and the "pipeline cache"?  If
I want to provisionally go back to my ISA WD90C30 video card, is there
likely to be an IRQ associated with the video display, that I would need
to redirect (to the ISA section)?

The card and display still work for Win95, so I guess I didn't smoke
anything vital.  Win95 did complain on boot that the video card was
uninstalled, and reinstalled it without problem.  (PnP is disabled on the
MB Bios, but Win95 may still exercise 'droit de segnieur' [sp?] on the
video board.) Finally a use for Win95, other than TurboTax.

Thanks for any suggestions. 

 John M. Mills, Senior Research Engineer   --   john.m.mills at gtri.gatech.edu
    Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0834
          Phone contacts: 404.894.0151 (voice), 404.894.6285 (FAX)
 "The one piece of advice I can give you is, put on sunscreen and wear a hat."
                          -- Ted Turner, GSU Commencement, Atlanta, 1994






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