MSI RS480M2-IL Athlon 64 Motherboard mini-review

The parts for my latest home PC arrived yesterday afternoon and Gabe and I spent a couple hours assembling them into a workable system. It’s amazing how much help a 4-year-old can provide, even around delicate PC parts. I now have a working Athlon 64 3000+ (S939) system with 1 GB of ram and a reasonably large amount of disk space sitting on my desk. I’m going to be using this for Xen testing, but I’ll write more about that later. For now, I want to concentrate on the hardware.

I went out on a limb a bit when ordering this system, because the motherboard I picked, MSI’s RS480M2-IL, is the first motherboard on the market with ATI’s first Athlon 64 chipset (the Radeon Xpress 200), and Google doesn’t give any clear Linux success stories for the motherboard or chipset. However, this is the only socket 939 board that I could find with on-board video, and I really like on-board video for servers. It was also quite a bit cheaper then buying a comparable board plus an AGP video card. A bit of poking around suggested that the SATA ports might be trouble, and it was unclear how well X supports the on-board video, but I don’t really care about either of those for this system. The parallel IDE ports and Ethernet are the only really important parts for me.

So, after installing all of the hardware, I burned a new Ubuntu install CD and gave it a spin. It booted up okay, found the network, found the IDE hard drives, and installed without any serious problems. Ubuntu’s install CD doesn’t seem to have a driver for ATI’s IDE chipset, so I was stuck in slow PIO mode, but it still worked. Once the install finished, I rebooted and watched Ubuntu try to add all of Gnome and OpenOffice to my nice little server system–yikes. After stopping that, I installed gcc, downloaded the source for Linux 2.6.11.4, and build a new kernel.

After booting the new kernel, almost everything looks okay. Here are the drivers needed for this hardware:

IDE: ATI IXP (in stock 2.6.11)
SATA: libata’s sata_sil driver detects 4 SATA ports. I have no SATA drives to use for testing, though.
Ethernet: 8193too (in stock 2.6.11)
IEEE1394/firewire: OHCI1394 (in stock 2.6.11). Only lightly tested, but able to mount disks connected to FW DVD burner.
USB: EHCI (8 ports USB 2.0)/OHCI (4 ports USB 1.1). Looks okay, but untested.

I’m currently fighting two problems:

Massive clock skew–the system clock is running twice as fast as it should. This is usually a power-management issue or a BIOS bug. A lot of new systems suffer from this, and it shouldn’t take too long to fix.
The system won’t reboot cleanly. Linux shuts down okay, but the system hangs and I need to hit ‘reset’ before it’ll reboot. This is probably related to problem #1.

Update (3/18/2005): Disabling the APIC fixed the clock problem, but not the reboot problem. I tried changing a number of power management settings without success. Most likely, the APIC will start working with a future BIOS revision. This problem seems to be preventing me from booting Xen right now, but that’ll probably be fixed by a new version of Xen in the fairly short term.

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:32:08 GMT

Read full article 155 comments

Comments

Dan 3 days later:

Did you need to do anything special in building the new kernel in amd64? I’ve installed debian on the same system.
Scott Laird 3 days later:

I haven’t tried the board in 64-bit mode. I need to use this system for testing Xen in 32-bit mode, so I’m sticking to 32-bit code for now. Later this year, Xen will probably have support for mixed 32- and 64-bit environments, but for now 32 is okay for me.

Besides, I didn’t think that Debian was currently all that great of a choice for 64-bit systems–when you install the amd64 packages on the box, you don’t (yet) get 32-bit libraries, so it’s not really 32-bit compatible. It’s supposed to change sooner or later, but I didn’t think it’d changed yet. I might have missed something, though.
kantor 9 days later:

hmm, and what about vga and onboad sound/spdif?
Scott Laird 13 days later:

I haven’t tested either the sound or the onboard video (except for text mode). I have no idea if they work or not.
George 14 days later:

You probably know this by now but there is a recall of boards that have a boot problem… I’d put the link here but your blog thinks it is spam.
Scott Laird 14 days later:

George mailed me the link: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20923
Chris Bennett 15 days later:

I’ve had some serious issues with installing linux on this motherboard.

I tried to boot Mandrake 10.1 which was already installed on the harddrive, and it failed at the init stage.. couldn’t mount the partitions. An attempt to re-install Mandrake 10.1 resulted in the IDE not being recognized. I then tried Mandrake 9.2.1 and that at least recognized the drive and was able to re-partition and start formatting it, but the format eventually died (spitting out a weird message about “base system not existing”).

So, I saw this article about installing Ubuntu and decided to give that a try. As with the original author’s experience, the Ubuntu install mostly worked. GDM would not start, however. XFree86 incorrectly auto-detected the video as an ATI Mach and so failed. I went in and manually forced it to use Standard VGA and was able to at least get some minimal video.

This seems to be a problem child for now, at least til some drivers become available. I primarily intend to use this system as a game server at the moment, though, so the current Ubuntu install may work for the intermediate future.

If anyone has any bleeding-edge distribution you think I should try, let me know…
Allan Boyd 19 days later:

I have also had plenty of problems with this board. My setup includes the rs480m2-il + amd64 3200+ + 1gb ram + nvidia 6600 pci-e + sony dvd rw inside an antec aria case.

First I tried Ubunto 64bit latest version. I could not get this to install. The install hangs early tring to get the frame buffer or something similar.

Suse 64bit also hangs during install but gets a bit further. It hangs when trying to determine the hardware.

Suse 32bit gets much further reaching the graphical installer. The installation hangs shortly after formatting the partitions.

Mandrake 10.1 64bit does not see the cd-rom (which is a problem on some other systems too). I tried 2 other cd-rom drives with the same issue.

Mandrake 9.1 32bit installs but could not connect to the network. This is strange because the router can see the pc and the eth0 status on the pc is fine - like it they can see each other but cannot communicate any data.

Vida Linux 64bit installs but when rebooting says it cannot find hda or hdc (the dvd). It then continues and claims to find the os on hdg. However, since the boot was installed on hda (during the Vida install process) it says it cannot find a boot and gives me a prompt. Unfortunately the keyboard is disabled so there is not much I can do.

Gentoo 64bit (in my case) requires the network to install. However, this suffers from exactly the same network problem as Mandrake 9.1. During the installation Gentoo complains that something might be hogging irqs.

Windows2000 installs but also suffers from the aforementioned network problem.

SimplyMepis. This installs (though I initially had some hangs formatting partitions that appear to have gone away possibly because of bios setup changes) and the network works fine - no problems. I do not understand this. It’s great I just do not understand how SimplyMepis gets the network to work. It should be said that it does complain that it cannot access two PCI addresses on startup though. Also SimplyMepis is only 32bit.

I have not been able to get the sound card working yet - it is lower on my list of prorities though. The graphics card is working fine.

Has anyone else seen a similar network issue? Originally the lan shared irqs with usb but I have disabled the com and parellel ports and now the lan is not sharing its irqs. This makes no difference. A separate PCI lan card has exactly the same problem - on everything except SimplyMepis also.

I have upgraded the Bios to v3.3 just it case it helped - but as expected it did not.
Chris Bennett 20 days later:

Allan, I may have one possibly helpful suggestion.

I just installed Mandrake 10.2 RC2 and I had network issues as well. My syslog contained various messages about transmit timeouts. I did some googling and saw that another person with the same error messages got things working by passing “noapic” to the kernel.

In my case I edited lilo.conf to add “noapic” to the kernel parameters, typed “lilo” to save it, rebooted, and the network suddenly worked perfectly (I can’t remember if it was also necessary to disable APIC in the BIOS, but I don’t think it was).

However, after much fiddling, I still have two remaining problems: 1) when I reboot the system, linux shuts down but fails to reboot and 2) my USB mouse/keyboard KVM does not work at all.

I’m going to play with Gentoo a little bit, but if that doesn’t work out well I’ll probably stick with the Mandrake 10.2 RC2 for now… at least I can get some use out of the machine with it.
Scott Laird 20 days later:

Yeah, noapic seems to be required right now. I think this is a BIOS issue, not really a kernel issue, but I haven’t tracked things done all the way. Most likely, one or more of the BIOS’s configuration tables is wrong, and Linux is unhappy.

I don’t know about the KVM switch problem, but I absolutely have reboot issues as well. After telling Linux to reboot, the system shuts down but then locks up hard. Reset works, but the soft-power-off button doesn’t–if I want to shut it down, then I need to either hold down the power button for 4 seconds or pull the plug.
Chris Bennett 20 days later:

Well I played with Gentoo for a while. What a freakin pain in the ass that distro is. Yes, I know how to manually create partitions and manually set up all of my networking files… but does that mean I want to actually do it manually??? Heck no. I spent two hours on the install and then realized that if this was the effort I’d have to go through in the future each time I get new hardware, I wanted nothing of it. The basic idea of the distro is cool, but it needs a MUCH better installer.

Anyway, after passing in “noapic” to the Debian installer, Sarge RC3 worked fine for me with this mobo. Debian seems slow to me but maybe I just haven’t gotten used to it yet.

I may stick with it on this machine though because it works with my USB mouse/keyboard and it reboots properly (important for me since I travel a lot and sometimes need to remotely reboot).
Allan Boyd 23 days later:

Thanks Chris and Scott.

I re-tried Ubuntu amd64 4.10 with noapi, nolapic and acpi=off and low and behold it installed perfectly with no network problems. The sound did not work though. So, making use of the newly discovered (for me) Synaptic package management tool I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu release (hoary). To my delight not only did the upgrade succeed but now I have sound! I am a fully converted Ubuntu fan.

However, there is one thing that I still cannot do and I am wondering if anyone has had the same problem. With both Simply Mepis and Ubuntu (the only two successful installs) hdparm will not allow me to enable dma. I get this:

HDIOSETDMA failed: Operation not permitted

I am experiencing pretty poor system performance when there is heavy disk activity and was hoping that I could cure the problem by enabling dma.

Also hdparm -i does not label any of the modes as currently active when using hdparm -i which is puzzling (to me anyway).
Scott Laird 24 days later:

Most likely, the kernel is built without support for ATI’s IDE chips. Take a look at the Ubuntu kernel’s .config file and see if the ATI IDE chipset support is turned on. There’s only one ATI IDE line, so it shouldn’t be hard to miss.
Ben Neuman 24 days later:

The latest Gentoo Universal Live CD installs well without network requirement. Usb Mouse, Usb keyboard, ethernet working well. Same reboot, apic, dma problems as others. Video thru vesa works. Don’t know about sound yet.
mats 25 days later:

the new kanotix 2005.02 seems to work quite well over here. network working and dma working have not tried a hdinstall yet as i have not got a spare hd atm i loaded the whole image to ram with the toram boot option.(u got to have 1gig to do so though) its plenty fast and i dont have to listen to the damned cdrom all the time.

give it a spinn kde 3.4 seems nice as well

cheers mats
Allan Boyd 27 days later:

re: dma

Well the kernel config option that I think probably refers to the ATI chipset is: CONFIGBLKDEV_ATIIXP (?) which is set to m so it should work. Is this the right config setting?

Anyway cached reads from hda are fine but buffered read performance is abismal at arouund 2.8 MB/sec.

The hdparm setting is: /dev/hda: multcount = 16 (on) IO_support = 1 (32-bit) unmaskirq = 0 (off) using_dma = 0 (off) keepsettings = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 256 (on) geometry = 65535/16/63, sectors = 81964302336, start = 0
```
 Model=Maxtor 6Y080L0, FwRev=YAR41BW0, SerialNo=Y20N6TNC
 Config={ Fixed }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=57
 BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=160086528
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2
 AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: (null):

 * signifies the current active mode
```
No current active mode. When I disable UDMA in the Bios I get mdma2 as the active mode but this does not help performance.

I have tried another hard drive and even changing the cable to no avail. If the kernel config is ok then I am thinking this might be a motherboard issue.

I am not a hardware or linux expert and would appreciate any ideas or opinions. Thanks.
Scott Laird 27 days later:

It’s compiled as a module? Ah, that’s probably the issue–the driver module isn’t loaded. Try running ‘modprobe atiixp’ as root.
Allan Boyd 27 days later:

Thanks again Scott for your help. However, before I read your reply I thought I would upgrade the kernel from 2.6.10 to 2.6.11. This upgrade solved the problem! Maybe the configuration is slightly different or something - I have not checked. I guess I should have followed your example and done this much earlier - someday I will learn.

Anyway I now have decent hard drive performance at last :-)) And by the looks of it there are no motherboard problems.
- Allan.
William Page 28 days later:

I just got one of these motherboards a week ago.

With the apic enabled, I can’t reboot. With the apic disabled, kernel locks up while identifying the serial ata stuff on bootup.

I have sound enabled, but I haven’t hooked up speakers yet.

hdparm apparently doesn’t work well with sata hard drives.

are the APIC problems due to a firmware problem, or a kernel problem? Who should I be talking to to let them know that I think this is a problem?

Has anyone gotten accelerated video with the ati-drivers working? I’ve had no luck.
Bender about 1 month later:

So basically you guys are saying this is a shitty board for running Linux?
Cynthia Jeness about 1 month later:

I have installed Suse 9.3 and also Fedora Core 4 - test 2 on this motherboard. Both seem to work OK excpet for the fact that the system clock runs twice as fast as the hardware clock. I wanted to use this computer for my new web server. Any thoughts on the clock problem. I am basically an application software developer and I do not know very much about the Linux kernel or hardware. So how do I disable APIC? I have not found anything in my bios settings that looks like APIC.
Scott Laird about 1 month later:

Add ‘noapic’ to the kernel command line. If you’re using grub, then you can usually find grub’s config file in /boot/grub/menu.lst; look for the first line that starts with ‘kernel’ and add ‘noapic’ to the end of the line. For lilo, edit /etc/lilo.conf and look the the first line that starts with ‘append’.

Alternately, you can do this at boot time; with grub press ‘e’ to edit the boot parameters.
Cynthia Jeness about 1 month later:

Disabling APIC did fix the clock problem; however, now the network is extremley slow. Thanks for the tip on how to do this.

Has anyone determined whether this is a kernel problem or a bios problem on the motherboard?
Scott Laird about 1 month later:

I don’t have network speed issues; how slow is it? What shows up in /proc/interrupts?
Ken Nordquist about 1 month later:

I have been playing with this board for a couple of weeks. I have a SATA drive. I too, have problems with 2x clock skew. If I boot with noapic or nolapic, the system just hangs, something to do with the SATA drive from what I understand.

I attempted a Gentoo install (what a beast!) but could never get it to reboot… From what I hear from a Gentoo enthusiast, the directions are incorrect. I then installed FC4 test2 which went pretty well except for the clock skew noted here as well as other places.

After applying Sunday’s (4/24/2005) FC4 test2 rawhide update, my system became unstable. In fact, my system has become more unstable with each succeeding rawhide update that I can no longer use it. I may just reinstall FC4 test2 again and not update it.

Oddly enough, the kanotix release noted above works fine… The clock does not skew either. It is not robust enough for me to use on a permanent basis, but does work.

Hopefully the kernel people get the clock skew problem fixed, though I have not seen any chatter about it anywhere.
Julian about 1 month later:

I have finally got FC4test2 up and running. It took me a couple downloads to realize that they were coming down fine and I was verifying them with md5 and not SHA1SUM (when did that change). I write this because there may be another person in the same boat. Other things have changed a lot since RH9 (like Xfree to X.org). I have been away from Linux for too long. Also, my company decided to not release SI for Linux. So I could not get into it on a daily basis.

I too have run into the system clock issue. Hopefully it will get fixed. I ran into the reboot issue also. Does anyone know about this? Maybe talked to MSI or have any new info? The system will not reboot with FC4Test2. I am running the 3.3 bios for the board.
Chrischin about 1 month later:

I am considering buying this board because it’s the only Socket 939 microatx board I can find. Do you Linux guru’s out there believe that these Linux issues may be solved soon? Or at least in the near future?
Scott Laird about 1 month later:

In the short term (1-2 months), this board will probably be okay for you if you’re looking for a server board, but I don’t think I can really recommend it for desktop use. People have been able to get it to work, but there’s a lot of tweaking required.

Longer-term, the problems should get fixed, but the first few months will be a pain.
Rolman about 1 month later:

Hi, I’m considering to buy a board with the same ATI northbridge and southbridge combination, but I’m concerned about the driver support, in particular about the SB400 SATA support. Are you sure the driver supporting it is sata_sil? I couldn’t find any information whether the MSI motherboard has a discrete SII SATA chipset or in fact the southbridge has a compatible chipset integrated.

Can you post the output of ‘lspci -v’? If the support is good enough I’ll buy it and share any tweaks I find with you guys.

Thanks in advance.
Torfinn Ingolfsen about 1 month later:

Here is the output from ‘lspci -v’ on my system. Warning: I’m running FreeBSD/amd64, not Linux: root@kg-quiet# uname -a FreeBSD kg-quiet.kg4.no 5.4-STABLE FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE #2: Tue May 3 22:40:03 CEST 2005 root@kg-quiet.kg4.no:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/QUIET amd64

‘lspci -v’ says: 00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5950 Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64 I/O ports at [disabled] Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)

00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5a3f (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 99 Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=68 I/O behind bridge: 0000e000-0000efff Memory behind bridge: fdd00000-fddfffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000d0000000-00000000dff00000 Capabilities: [44] #08 [a803] Capabilities: [b0] #0d [0000]

00:11.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 437A Serial ATA Controller (prog-if 8f [Master Se cP SecO PriP PriO]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11 I/O ports at fe00 I/O ports at fd00 I/O ports at fc00 I/O ports at fb00 I/O ports at fa00 Memory at fe02f000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:12.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 4379 Serial ATA Controller (prog-if 8f [Master Se cP SecO PriP PriO]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10 I/O ports at f900 I/O ports at f800 I/O ports at f700 I/O ports at f600 I/O ports at f500 Memory at fe02e000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4374 (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10 Memory at fe02d000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4375 (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10 Memory at fe02c000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4373 (prog-if 20 [EHCI]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10 Memory at fe02b000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc ATI SMBus (rev 04) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: 66Mhz, medium devsel I/O ports at 0400 Memory at fe02a000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [b0] #08 [a802]

00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller ATI (prog-if 8a [Master SecP PriP]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 255 I/O ports at I/O ports at I/O ports at I/O ports at I/O ports at f300 Capabilities: [70] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4377 Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 0

00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4371 (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode]) Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64 Bus: primary=00, secondary=02, subordinate=02, sec-latency=32 I/O behind bridge: 0000d000-0000dfff Memory behind bridge: fdc00000-fdcfffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: fde00000-fdefffff

00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4370 Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 0080 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, slow devsel, latency 64, IRQ 3 Memory at fe029000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [40] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-

00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration Flags: fast devsel Capabilities: [80] #08 [2101]

00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map Flags: fast devsel

00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller Flags: fast devsel

00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control Flags: fast devsel

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5954 (prog-if 00 [VGA]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 7141 Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 3 Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) I/O ports at ef00 Memory at fddf0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

02:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 093c Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 5 I/O ports at df00 Memory at fdcff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

02:04.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80) (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.: Unknown device 093d Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11 Memory at fdcfe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) I/O ports at de00 Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

Hope this helps anyone.
rei about 1 month later:

just got this board, having similar problems where usb kvm doesn’t work (power only comes on briefly it seems) and also have POST-ing problem where it randomly stalls on rebooting after the cpu identification and before memory-check/ide detection.

using winxp sp2 but this problem occurs before i get into an os-specific boot process.

wish i knew this before i bought the board, going nuts trying to isolate problem, trying ram first but currently trolling msi forums: http://forum.msi.com.tw and ars technica for advice
Scott Laird about 1 month later:

rei–if the board won’t POST, then that’s usually a good indication that you’re looking at broken hardware. Most likely it’s a bad motherboard, but it could be the CPU, memory, power supply, or practically anything else that’s plugged into it. I had a friend with a bad PC that he couldn’t fix, even after swapping every single component in the case out for new parts. It turned out that his keyboard was broken, and was grounding something and screwing up the rest of the system.

Anyway, I’d start by RMAing the motherboard; I’d give that about a 60% chance of fixing your problem.
Rodney Moss about 1 month later:

I’m having similar hells with this board. It is not good for linux. it is dubious whether it would be a good choice for windows.

This thread has a few non-linux-specific comments: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=1557421&enterthread=y A thread on the MSI boards mentioned a need to clear the bios whenever changing hardware.

It is relevant that many other companies haven’t released the RS480 boards they have in their product list.

It is also relevant, i think, that MSI do not have this board (or any other socket-939) in their knowledge base query. ATI likewise, you seemingly cannot register that you own this product, in order to get any support, let alone linux support.

Mail to ATI about which drivers are supposed to be used for linux, gets auto-replied with a note ditecting you to linux/X documentation sites that do not mention the chipset.

In the latest CVS snapshot of xorg, 6.8.99.5 the radeon driver half works. X starts and the mouse pointer looks fine and works, but the pictures below are all smeared across the screen almost like a refresh rate problem.

lspci doesn’t recognise the chipset, or the graphics. I haven’t tried kernels later than 2.6.11-gentoo-r7. I’ll give 2.6.12_rc4 a go, justfor “fun”
Mats about 1 month later:

I still say; if you want a desktop install, go with Kanotix for this motherboard atm , its not that unstable (not for a server though), and has nice apps, and lots of nice “special” stuff like captiveNTFS, and lots of wlan drivers. ..But beware of apt-get dist-upgrade…

…other stuff that works is just around the corner as well, i guess…
Rodney Moss about 1 month later:

Anonymous new to linux person: People have trouble getting this motherboard to work with windows.

Differences between linux and windows:

With linux, there are (basically) no graphics drivers. I got mail back from ATI saying they will not provide the drivers, they are leaving that to MSI. which seemingly means ATI provide NONE of the advertised linux support on which i bought the board. You can use the “vesa” driver in X. It will be poor. I can’t get it to do 1280x1024 with vesa, and the whole system often crashes when switching X sessions or to console. Your board might work better than mine, the boards’ bugginess has a fairly random distributions, some people’s work.

In linux there’s a clock problem, which may be due to the kernel not knowing the chipset, and in windows is probably fixed by the supplied MB drivers. To fix it in linux, you seemingly have to boot without APIC, which as someone noted above, may mean sata won’t work.

There’s power management stuff in linux that may help the board’s bugginess on shutdown. Since no-one knows what the problem is caused by, adjustments here to the kernel are sort of random. I found the problem lessened when i disabled the ACPI Processor P-States driver Location:
x -> Power management options
x -> CPU Frequency scaling

This is a bad board, it has NO linux support unlike advertised, and not at all a good choice for anyone new to linux.

The foxconn nforce4 micro-atx socket 939 board is likely to be a much better option in linux. (though it may still have memory issues, at least it can set the timings) Foxconn has no onboard graphics, but then, no 2d drivers for the ATI yet, and no-one knows about 3d drivers, ATI seemingly won’t say, so you’re going to have to buy a graphics card anyway.

For using this board for anything, it might ease your pain if you use low performance RAM, since it has trouble with high performance. See the MSI forums.
Rodney Moss about 1 month later:

Anonymous new-to-linux This is not a good board under any OS.

This is not the place to ask for a general install guide, and i can’t tell you anything about mepis.

Differences with this board to a normal linux install:

Disabling the ” ACPI Processor P-States driver” in kernel helped me with the board’s shutdown/reboot issue. If you don’t have this problem in windows, it will probably not effect you in linux either.

There are no good graphics drivers, and it seems ATI won’t provide them. You can set X to use the vesa or vga drivers, but they will be poor. This means you will have to buy a video card. I suggest an nvidia one.

If you haven’t bought the board yet, consider a foxconn nforce4 micro-atx board instead (about the only other socket 939 micro-atx on the market). No onboard video, but if you have to buy one anyway that’s no big loss.

I can’t help with SATA issues.

~~~~~~~

I can’t do 1280x1024 with vesa and the onboard graphics, anyone else have this problem?
Rodney Moss about 1 month later:

Please pardon the posting about the same thing twice. i thought the first one failed, reloaded the page it wasn’t here, so re-wrote it.
Rodney Moss about 1 month later:

Anonymous, Suggestion You tried linux, linux, and linux, on this board, and no time did linux work to your satisfaction. Perhaps you would have been better spending your time trying only one linux, and learning what you needed to do to get it to work.

Any linux install boot disc i’ve seen lets you pass needed kernel options, noapic for example. Any linux i’ve seen expects you will be compiling your own kernel to suit your hardware needs.

Most of this board’s problems seem to exist for windows, too. That it works fine for you in XP suggests it will also work now for you, if crippled by no support, in linux. And it will work just as fine when ATI provide a kernel patch for the chipset, (and a video driver).
PJ about 1 month later:

Hello ,

I’m considering to build up system with AMD64 and here mentioned MB “MSI RS480M2-IL”. Does anybody know if this board fits to Antec’s Aria case ? screws holes? backplane ? connectors compatibility ? Any other suggestion for uATX with Antecs Aria ? I plan to run Kanotix and Win XP. LAN and FW is required.
Peter Lyons 2 months later:

Can anyone post some details around the process of installing using a distro with a kernel older than 2.6.11 onto an IDE disk, recompiling a new 2.6.11 kernel that can read the sata drives, and then switching over to the sata drive? I think I’m 98% there, but am stuck on an error message.

Here’s an overview of my process:

Connect 2 SATA drives and 1 IDE drive

Configure BIOS to boot the IDE first

Boot an Ubuntu 5.04 install CD

Install Ubuntu onto the IDE drive (uses kernel 2.6.10-5). I’m using a single partition for the filesystem and another one for swap.

Do the necessary debian routine to get up to a 2.6.11 kernel. Before I build the new kernel, I do a:
```
# echo sata_sil &gt;&gt; /etc/mkinitrd/modules
```
Format the partitions on the SATA drive I want to run off of eventually

Set up the file systems on the new drive

Copy over the files as such:
```
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/fsroot
# cd /
# tar cf - --exclude=proc .|(cd /mnt/fsroot;tar xf -)&
```
Fix a few files so they know to use the sata drive:
```
# GM=/mnt/fsroot/boot/grub/menu.lst
# sed -e 's/hdc/sdb/' ${GM} &gt; ${GM}.new;mv ${GM}.new ${GM}
# DM=/mnt/fsroot/boot/grub/device.map
# sed -e 's/hdc/sdb/' ${DM} &gt; ${DM}.new;mv ${DM}.new ${DM}
# FS=/mnt/fsroot/etc/fstab
# sed -e 's/hdc/sdb/' ${FS} &gt; ${FS}.new;mv ${FS}.new ${FS}
# cat  &lt;&lt; EOF &gt; /boot/grub/device.map
```
(hd0) /dev/sdb (hd1) /dev/sda EOF # cp /boot/grub/device.map /mnt/fsroot/boot/grub/device.map # grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/fsroot –no-floppy /dev/sdb

Then I power off, remove the IDE drive, boot up.

Grub loads correctly and loads the kernel, but the kernel panics. The error messages are:
```
pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sbin/init: 428: cannot open dev/console: no such file
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
```
Anyone have a better process? Anyone know what I’m missing?

Thanks!
Pascal Wolfe 2 months later:

Hello,

I want to all this issues. I past two weeks to figure out what was causing the problem with Linux Fedora 3. For me I disable APIC and USB and the BIOS and everything seems to be fine. Is there any body can tell me how to make USB working without hang the system at the boot time

Thank you
Pascal Wolfe 2 months later:

Hello,

I went to all this issues. I past two weeks to figure out what was causing the problem with Linux Fedora 3. For me I disable APIC and USB and the BIOS and everything seems to be fine. Is there any body can tell me how to make USB working without hang the system at the boot time

Thank you
Philipp 2 months later:

Good news, ATI have just released Linux drivers for Radeon Xpress 200: http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27”;>http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27
Philipp 2 months later:

Direct link: http://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=19511
Lars Dam 2 months later:

To Pascal Wolfe:

USB may work, but your device hatls the system. I have no problem with my usb (external usb dvd drive). However if i insert my iPod shuffle at boot time the system halts. So try disable USB for booting, or unplug all your usb devies while booting.

kr. ld (who have problems with the clock skew and SATA - using noapic to the kernel apparantly blocks my system from booting my raid-sata setup)
Jacob Oursland 2 months later:

Hey gang. I too have been fighting on and off with this board. The kernel list has a totally sweet kernel patch posted by Chris Wing to solve the problem.

Apply that and add “timerhack” to your kernel parameters.

I have recompiled the kernel only about 40 times and played with the bios twice as many. This seems to work, however the patch is only for 64-bit. But, if you change the x86_64 to i386 in the patch header, I think it’ll work as the function is the same but the lines may be off.

Currently, I am running Gentoo with vanilla kernel 2.6.11.10 in 64-bit.

Whenever I disable the IO-APIC I get no control over my hardware, so its my belief that there is no XT-PIC to route the interrupts (irqs) when it is disabled. This totally ruins important things like networking.

This will probably help many of you with hardware not being recognized errors. I have been running KDE on my NVidia 6600GTOC at 1280x1024 with no problems with the patch, without it is totally unreliable, which means something must be dependant on accurate timing in the driver.

For the uninitiated linux kernel hackers: Essentially the timer is doubled because the regular timer emits its interrupt, but the IO-APIC also emits it interrupt, so timer is effectively doubled. The patch just cuts out setting up the IO-APIC timer if “timerhack” is a kernel parameter.

Many thanks to Chris Wing for his hard work!!!

The patch by Chris Wing:
```
--- arch/x86_64/kernel/io_apic.c.orig 2005-03-25 22:28:21.000000000 -0500 
+++ arch/x86_64/kernel/io_apic.c 2005-04-07 13:13:58.813193024 -0400 
 @@ -1564,6 +1564,8 @@ 
   * is so screwy. Thanks to Brian Perkins for testing/hacking this beast 
   * fanatically on his truly buggy board. 
   */ 
 +static int timer_hack = 0; 
 + 
  static inline void check_timer(void) 
  { 
          int pin1, pin2; 
@@ -1597,7 +1599,7 @@ 
                   * Ok, does IRQ0 through the IOAPIC work? 
                   */ 
                  unmask_IO_APIC_irq(0); 
 - if (timer_irq_works()) { 
 + if ((!timer_hack) && timer_irq_works()) { 
                          nmi_watchdog_default(); 
                          if (nmi_watchdog == NMI_IO_APIC) { 
                                  disable_8259A_irq(0); 
 @@ -1669,6 +1671,14 @@ 
          panic("IO-APIC + timer doesn't work! Try using the 'noapic' kernel parameter\n"); 
  } 

+static int __init timerhack(char *str) 
 +{ 
 + timer_hack = 1; 
 + return 1; 
 +} 
 +__setup("timerhack", timerhack); 
 + 
 + 
  /* 
   * 
   * IRQ's that are handled by the PIC in the MPS IOAPIC case.
```
Anurup 2 months later:

Hi Guys,

Been following this page with utmost interest since I got the MSI RS480M2-IL board a couple of months back. Was thrilled to find Philipp’s post about the release of ATI drivers for the Xpress 200. However, direct rendering isn’t working and I get this when I try to compile the kernel module :
```
ATI module generator V 2.0
==========================
initializing...
cleaning...
patching 'highmem.h'...
```
assuming new VMA API since we do have kernel 2.6.x… doing Makefile based build for kernel 2.6.x and higher make -C /lib/modules/kernel-2.6.11-1.1286FC4/build SUBDIRS=/lib/modules/fglrx/buildmod/2.6.x modules make[1]: Entering directory /usr/src/linux-headers-kernel-2.6.11-1.1286_FC4' CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/nvidia-agp.o /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/nvidia-agp.c:57: error: static declaration of '__fgl_agp_try_unsupported' follows non-static declaration /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/agp_backend.h:92: error: previous declaration of '__fgl_agp_try_unsupported' was here make[2]: *** [/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/nvidia-agp.o] Fout 1 make[1]: *** [_module_/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x] Fout 2 make[1]: Leaving directory/usr/src/linux-headers-kernel-2.6.11-1.1286_FC4’ make: * [kmod_build] Fout 2 build failed with return value 2

Am using FC4 Test 3. (that’s gcc 4)

Someone told me that this was in all probability a gcc error. I’ve tried various workarounds eg. uninstalling gcc 4 and trying to compile with gcc32 (wherein it complains that my kernel was built with gcc 4, and hence this has to be too) but to no avail.

The driver did solve some problems over the vesa driver (which I had been forced to use earlier) - like tvtime runs perfectly and doesn’t complain of missing YUV overlays in the graphics card etc.

Do any of you know a way out of this build error? It would be really nice to put an end to my sleepless nights. :-) Thanks
Rodney Moss 2 months later:

PJ: Myself and others are using it in an Antec Aria case. It fits fine. The Antec aria won’t be what stops it working.
Rodney Moss 2 months later:

All that work for 10% more FPS over software 3d with an external card. for washed out colours, and 64M less RAM.

Um, i dunno if there’s something i should maybe have in xorg.conf or something, to make the RS480 actually move above a crawl, but, from what i see in glxgears, the hardware accelleraton is only 10% faster than software. Maybe if the fglrxconfig program as well as the driver recognised the chipset, it could do the right switches.

I walked away for a few hours, leaving glxgears running. Had trouble getting the monitor back when i returned..

Found this in glxgears log: 1948 frames in 333.0 seconds = 5.850 FPS about a minute later 4278 frames in 34.0 seconds = 125.824 FPS

This in dmesg warning: many lost ticks. Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging interupts rip 0x2aaaabbc2994

And some APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)

Maybe that patch is a problem? Maybe i need to read that kernel thread more?

At boot i get Using local APIC NMI watchdog using perfctr0 ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC failed. timer doesn’t work through the IO-APIC - disabling NMI Watchdog! works. Using local APIC timer interrupts.

then a bit later: input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard on isa0060/serio0 Losing some ticks… checking if CPU frequency changed. Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 3d. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled? input: ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse on isa0060/serio1

All a bit weird. Anyone else on what timerhack should/shouldn’t do or anything?
Kiel 2 months later:

Hi.

I know that everybody seems to be having some problems with this board, what with time, or sound, or whatnot.

I’d just like to tell you all that I think you’re looking in the wrong place to fix all these problems.

My board shuts down normally, reboots normally, has no problems with time, no problems with graphics (excepting that it’s VESA, not a real driver) and no problems with networking.

All that it required was for me to disable ACPI in the BIOS. That’s honestly it. I don’t pass any options to the kernel, I don’t have any special tweaks anywhere.

I’ll reboot to check in my BIOS exactly what that option was again, and then post again on here, to let those interested know.
Kiel 2 months later:

The option is “APIC Mode” under “Advanced BIOS options” in the Phoenix bios v3.2. Set that to disabled, and try that. It worked for me, I’ve not had any problems with network throttling down, or timer issues, or anything like that.
Balaji 2 months later:

Hi guys

I’m interested in buying this MB in the hope that I would not need to buy a dedicated Graphics card. Did the ATI Direct Rendering work on this, and how good/bad is it for games?

Thanks
Balaji 2 months later:

Wanted to check if the solution posted by Kiel solved the issues for other users?

Also which distro are you running Kiel?

Thanks in advance.
John Belmonte 2 months later:

I have a different AMD motherboard (Chaintech MK8M800 with VIA chipset), but the same reboot problem.

Disabling the APIC from BIOS does not help. What works for me is either the i8042.reset boot parameter or a one line kernel change posted at http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0408.1/1505.html (almost a year ago…). Note that this is not an issue with 2.4 kernels.
Kiel 2 months later:

I was a little hasty previously, to may chagrin now.

I was using Gentoo, and decided to put Windows on a partition for gaming, and due to a mistake proceeded to fsck up my Gentoo partitions. Thusly, I decided to go ahead and install Ubuntu, after Windows.

Windows will barely runs with that option disabled. If that option is enabled, Ubunutu (with boot parameters ‘noapic nolapic’) boots into a state I’d call ‘barely useable’ (64-bit version of Hoary Hedgehog), in that the slightest action causes 100% cpu useage, and sometimes opening firefox causes 15% load on the computer.

I wish that I could be of more help, but I’m still very unfamiliar with the workings of Linux in general.
Anurup 2 months later:

Balaji, Kiel’s solution didn’t work for me either.
Scott Holdren 2 months later:

I’ve been struggling with this for a couple weeks, finally sat down and tried everything listed. I started with Mandriva LE2005, which installed fine on an SATA drive, but I still had the reboot/clock problems.

Advanced BIOS Features->APIC Mode = Disabled Power Management Setup->ACPI Function = Disabled

and use noapic as a boot option.

Doing any subset of those things prevented it from booting. Had to do all three, and it seems to be working fine.
Tommi Vainikainen 2 months later:

I had no such problems that stopped boot process with kernel 2.6.11 (Debian packaged), but reboot halts sometimes before BIOS and clockskew was similar with others. Disabling ACPI also disables the automatic shutdown. :-(

It seems that MSI page has some BIOS updates, has anybody tried those? Maybe those are not very useful, at least according to the changelogs, changes look quite irrelevant for these problems.

With SATA hd, Debian wasn’t easy to install but I recompiled the installer with replace the kernel with 2.6.11 so I could install Debian testing (sarge) to my SATA hd… nice learning experience.
ChrisChin 2 months later:

Rodney Moss wrote: “This is not a good board under any OS.”

But I have found it to work fine under Windows 2000. I am currently using it in a HTPC-PVR setup with a Silverstone LC-11M case and Hauppauge PVR-500 dual analog tuners. It works well under SageTV. However, it’s been my dream to eventually get to using Linux and MythTV. So while this board remains a rubbish option for Linux, I have to vigorously dispute that it is a bad board under Windows. The problem is that there are no other Socket 939 microATX solutions with integrated S-video and S/PDIF. Too bad, really, as these two features on a microATX board are very useful for HTPCs. Even though I feel like a tool for being restricted to running Windows, I have to admit that it does run pretty well, and for the price ($80) and features (no need for external audio or s-video) it’s a great choice. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone looking at this board who wasn’t specifically going to make a HTPC.
ChrisChin 2 months later:

Rodney Moss wrote: “This is not a good board under any OS.”

But I have found it to work fine under Windows 2000. I am currently using it in a HTPC-PVR setup with a Silverstone LC-11M case and Hauppauge PVR-500 dual analog tuners. It works well under SageTV. However, it’s been my dream to eventually get to using Linux and MythTV. So while this board remains a rubbish option for Linux, I have to vigorously dispute that it is a bad board under Windows. The problem is that there are no other Socket 939 microATX solutions with integrated S-video and S/PDIF. Too bad, really, as these two features on a microATX board are very useful for HTPCs. Even though I feel like a tool for being restricted to running Windows, I have to admit that it does run pretty well, and for the price ($80) and features (no need for external audio or s-video) it’s a great choice. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone looking at this board who wasn’t specifically going to make a HTPC.
ChrisChin 2 months later:

Rodney Moss wrote: “This is not a good board under any OS.”

But I have found it to work fine under Windows 2000. I am currently using it in a HTPC-PVR setup with a Silverstone LC-11M case and Hauppauge PVR-500 dual analog tuners. It works well under SageTV. However, it’s been my dream to eventually get to using Linux and MythTV. So while this board remains a rubbish option for Linux, I have to vigorously dispute that it is a bad board under Windows. The problem is that there are no other Socket 939 microATX solutions with integrated S-video and S/PDIF. Too bad, really, as these two features on a microATX board are very useful for HTPCs. Even though I feel like a tool for being restricted to running Windows, I have to admit that it does run pretty well, and for the price ($80) and features (no need for external audio or s-video) it’s a great choice. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone looking at this board who wasn’t specifically going to make a HTPC.
ChrisChin 2 months later:

I apologize for the multiple (long) posts. Browser and connection problems.
Azhrei 2 months later:

Well, I bought an eMachines box with this mobo in it: Athlon64, 512MB, ATI Radeon 800 XPRESS.

I’ve tried a bunch of different distributions: SUSE 9{1,2} in 64bit, and RHEL4, Knoppix, aLinux, VectorLinux, and others in 32bit. Right now I’m running the just-released (a few hours ago!) FC4 and everything works except the built-in RTL8139C+ ethernet and the clock skew. I’m going to try rebooting with i8042.reset first, then try notimerhack (which already appears in the kernel source where the patch above would go).

I’ve downloaded the latest ATI drivers and will be installing them shortly. (I accidentally installed the 32bit drivers and guess what? They don’t work with a 64bit version of Xorg 6.8 – surprise, surprise! :) Anyway, so I’ll try the 64bit stuff next. And I’m bookmarking this page so that I can come back and report success/failure.

I’m getting the latest Debian 64bit via bittorrent right now; first DVD is done, the second has about 3 hours to go at 200KB/s. (Sigh. How did I ever survive with my old dial-up line?!?!)
Henrik Wallin 3 months later:

With the noapic-option I have no problems exept the computer refuses to restart after a reboot. It runs http://www.elfpack.com/ http://www.cathug.com/ http://www.musmakers.com/ and a couple of other sites, so it’s a busy server on this dirtcheap motherboard. It runs Mandriva 2005 (preview), but I had to recomplie the kernel because the ATA (No problem with the SATA though) module wasn’t a part of the kernel (pretty strange!).

But now I’ve bought 2 GByte memory more that sums up to a total of 4 Gbyte. It’s 4 modules of “TwinMOS PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB CL3 64M*8/16chip, 184-P (for DDR-PC400MHz)”. But the motherboard only finds 3.25 GByte memory! 3.25?!? Has anyone managed to get 4GByte on this card? I’ll do a test and see if there is something wrong with any of the (1GByte marked) modules later, but as the server is up and running, I don’t want to take it down right now just to see why I don’t get those 0.75GByte.
MyTzLpLk 3 months later:

Henrik Wallin: I have the same 4 GIG issue where only 3.x of it appears in “top” command in shell. I have read that it is normal to only see 3.x of “real” memory out of 4 GIG of hardware. Please advise if you find out more. I am interested too. Also, I am having a problem getting X going on Gentoo on this board
Scott Laird 3 months later:

For people with 4 GB probems–are you running a 32-bit Linux system or a 64-bit system? If it’s 32-bit, then make sure that the kernel is compiled with support for the highest amount of memory (I think it’s 64 GB, but I’m to lazy to check right now). The default is usually 4 GB these days, but that includes PCI I/O space and a bunch of other things, so you don’t actually get all 4 GB of RAM. Increasing the kernel’s limit to 64 GB will make it run a bit slower, but you’ll have access to all your RAM.
ppip 3 months later:

Advanced BIOS Features->APIC Mode = Disabled Power Management Setup->ACPI Function = Disabled and use noapic as a boot option.

This made me can’t halt my computer, what can i do?
Xiaoqing Ge 3 months later:

Hi, I have a HP Pavilion a1070cl PC. This Pc uses this mainboard. I have two disks. One is SATA disk which installed Windows XP, the other one is IDE disk which installed FC4-64. The FC4-64 also have time problem. I set the noapic option when I boot the FC4-64, but the FC4-64 can’t boot. When I disable the SATA disk, the FC4-64 can boot up and the time problem has fixed. I don’t know why.
MyTzLpLk 3 months later:

Thanks, Scott, for the reply. I am using Gentoo 64 bit O/S compiled from scratch. I have applied all of the stuff I have learned here and it has helped immensely. However, I have too issues, one not so big, the other very big. 1.) that 3.x of 4 gig RAM showing mentioned above. 2.) this is big because I cannot install a software package that requires X to be running and I do not have X running (never wanted to run X on this box but I have to because of some genius writing an X only version of installer with no way around it). So, bottom line is I dont know how to get X.org to work with on-board ATI Express 200. I get a black screen when I fire up X on that box. Any suggestions? Thank you. Regards, MyTzLpLk
Scott Laird 3 months later:

One work-around for X-based installers: run X on another box and have the installer display things remotely. Just make sure that enough of X is installed to allow things like xterm to run, then (from a system with X working) ssh -X to the RS480 system. Then run the installer, and hopefully it’ll be happy.
ppip 3 months later:

To MyTzLpLk: You should use ati-drivers 8.13.3, which works well for me.
Chris Bennett 3 months later:

ppip, I’ve got Mandriva 2005 LE installed and working fine with ACPI enabled. I believe that ACPI is resoinsible for the rebooting functionality that you’re missing, so try enabling the ACPI again and see how things work for you.

Note that I do still have “noapic” specified.

On a separate tangent, the computer using this motherboard is now successfully changing its CPU speed based on the processing needs at the time, which is very nice for keeping my server running cool and quiet. All I had to do with my stock Mandriva 2005 LE was set /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor to “ondemand”. The functionality for this is now built into the kernel.. very cool!
Rodney Moss 3 months later:

ChrisChin wrote:

“So while this board remains a rubbish option for Linux, I have to vigorously dispute that it is a bad board under Windows.”

The rebooting issue seems very common with this board, in windows. That’s not a feature of a good board. The lack of voltage controls for ram is unpleasant. That’s not a feature of a good board. The low performance is not a good feature, either. All of these affect windows users. It may not be a particularly bad board for windows, but it is definately not good. At the time i wrote “this is not a good board under any circumstance”, ATI did not seem to acknowledge the chipset at all for any support questions, not just linux. That’s not a feature of a good board, either. How many BSOD’s are going to come from what turns up for linux users as the clock skew?

It does have a nice set of features. It would be a good board if it also worked well. Perhaps some people’s boards do work well.

I’m also not sure whether it’s still a rubbish option for linux. ATI might have submitted patches now in 2.6.12, the 3.4 bios might have fixed something, who knows? One day i’ll try them. But i’m in no hurry to test, i bought foxconn’s nforce4 microatx 939. Which works. Without having to edit kernel source if i want APIC. (needs a graphics card and fanless chipset heatsink, though)
Henrik Wallin 3 months later:

Just to clearify:

Regarding the 4 GByte => 3.25GByte issue (Yes, it’s exactly 0.75GByte missing, down to the byte). It is what it shows in the BIOS at start-up, so this has nothing to do with the operating-system (which of course is a 64bit Mandriva 2005 LE).

Hopefully there will be a bios-update for this, but bios-updates are nothing I will try until I’m sure it works and I badly need that last 0.75 GByte.

And Chris Bennett: Thanks for those great tips! I really want my reboot to work, but I don’t pay for my power, so that is a non-issue ;-)
Chris G 4 months later:

I’m really interested to have read the comments above from Chris Chin regarding the RS480. I have a very similar setup - RS 480, LC11M, PVR-500. However, it was very stable before adding the PVR-500, now is locks up - toally dead - when capturing video from the PVR-500. I put it down to the 500 and cant see much option apart from returning this and getting a more established card. I’d be most grateful if you could reply and let me know your settings etc if you have got the RS480 & PVR-500 combo to work. I think its a very good h/w choice for HTPC so far! cheers, Chris G
David Marshall 4 months later:

I have come to the conclusion that this board is just plain rubbish. With windows I found that apic, acpi, and AMD cool ‘n’ quiet off is the best setting. Windows 98 would not boot after install, even with different install CDS. Windows 2000: installed clock problems, slow, and blue screen of death. Windows XP 32bit sp1&2: New install disk took at least 10 attempts to install. Very slow boot time at least 4 min. even with assigned IP and or network disconnected. System clock still way too fast. All the programs hang or are very sluggish. With either a CRT or flat screen monitor picture quality was poor. However, the wintv card works okay. Sound, the tube transistor am radio in my 1950 Studebaker champion has better sound quality. None of the above was ironed out even with Norton 2005 system works. Now we come to Linux: Ubuntu 64 bit: installed no apic, acpi, and AMD cool ‘n’ quiet. No D.M.A.= no Ubuntu. Mandriva: would not go past install. Fedora Core (4) 64 bit: no apic, acpi, and AMD cool ‘n’ quiet. Fast works well, clock skew can be remedied by having the network correct the time at startup. Irritated by the fact of having to chase endless dependencies over multimedia copyright issues. Stuck with VESA. Sound is okay, better than windows XP. SUSE 9.3 64 bit: Fast works well. This one seems a bit odd, apic and acpi on, SuSe would not boot with either of those two off. Oh, and unless you like working with xdm don’t let xdm install for some reason SuSe likes to use that as default. Go to sysconf in Yast and disable acpi Cpu settings and the system will properly recognize your cpu speed. Sound is okay, better than windows XP. After dealing with the DVD copyright issue and getting the tv card to work, I thought I would stick with SuSe (more packages and less dependancies to chase). Still have not figured out the clock skew though. My final deal was the new ati flgrx driver. I thought if I followed the instructions verbatim I would not have any problems. Everything seemed to check out until reboot. The new driver messed up the X server. Now I can only boot into console. The fact that this board was not designed for Linux use I understand and accept. However, when this board which is designed for windows performs so poorly running windows (even with the new bios and driver updates) I think is reprehensible and down right fraudulent. After careful thought I have come up with the following solutions: Buy a plane ticket to Taiwan and choke the first MSI employee I see. Lobby congress against any arms shipments to Taiwan to counter the Chinese commies, Find an Ati employee and do the same, Choke out the jerk at computer renaissance who would not let me return the board because he did not install the board, wait till someone with more patience than I to figure it out, or do a little research before I make another impulse buy.
Kiel 4 months later:

Anyone have SATA working on this board? If so, please post how you got it to work, as I’d be much grateful. I have a 250GB SATA HDD that I want to get up and installed, but I don’t know why it seems that everytime I modprobe the sata_sil module, while the HD is plugged in, it hangs. Also, even if the module isn’t probed, it hangs at boot with an IRQ #11 error message. TIA
Xiaoqing GE 4 months later:

Hi Kiel:

I have a 80G SATA HD on this board. I installed WinXP with SP2 on it. It works well.

Please check your bios setting: The SATA device shuld be set to “enable” and the apic shuld be set to “enable” too.
Denis Boudreau 4 months later:

I’m also having a ?%$%?&&* of a time installing linux whit this motherboard. To same thing happen to me. After installing the motherboard, it booted ma Windows Xp partition fine execpt of having to use the install CD to repair. But, the computer give me all kind a error messages when I tried to boot me Mandrake 10.2 partition. I’ve tried re-installing several time, but the systeme always freeze. I’ve tried Suse 9.3, FC4, Mandrake 10, all without any succes. The only Linux version that installed correctly is Xandros 3.0 but it’s doesn’t sut me because there is no french version yet. I was almost able to install Mandriva LE 2005 x86_64 last night by unpluging all my USB device and using a PS/2 mouse an disabling autodetec devices, but I’ve forgot that I also needed a PS/2 keyboard ! So I had to shutdown my computer when I was ask to input a pasword ! I guest I going to try again as soon I get my hand on a PS/2 keyboard.
Kiel 4 months later:

Yeah, it was being recognized by Win for me as well, but I wanted to use it in Linux.

As for that, I got it working. I had to enable APIC (as in remove the “noapic” boot parameter), but now I don’t get any response from the USB on the MB; I couldn’t use my USB keyboard or mouse, which was a pain. However, the SATA drive works fine now…

Anyone have any ideas on this problem?
rog 4 months later:

MSI RS480M2-IL Athlon 64 3500 2x1 gb ram. 2x250 sata raid. windows xp mce. antec aria, digital tv card.

2 months now still very stable no probs at all?? was gonna try another o/s but i think i will wait now till you guys have sorted all the problems.

Rog
abins 4 months later:

Hi,

I trying to install Fedora Core -4 on this motherboard and I am having the same problem of IRQ11 getting disabled and installation getting hanged.

Which linux distribution did you use? Also how were your bios settings regarding apic and acpi?

Abins
EFM 4 months later:

No post, PCI card says it hangs at #25 “hangs at Password ck”? I have tried resetting CMOS shorting pins, removed the bat started it for a second, replaced bat again nothing. Any one have same problem?
Stephen Tashiro 4 months later:

I have two MSI RS480 motherboards. If I copied the BIOS string correctly, they came with: RS480-SB4VV-6A666M4DC-00-W7093AMS V3.3 030305 14:08:27

I’ve built two systems, each with a Sony DVD writer, floopy, Hitachi SATA drive and Imation zip250 drive. Both have a curious problem: When it is used as a master on either IDE controller, the zip250 is detected as a hard drive. I set the hard drive priority in the BIOS to use the SATA drive as first priority. This works for one or two reboots, but then the machine fails to find the SATA drive and when you reboot and look in the BIOS, the zip250 has moved to first priority, all by itself, as it were. My solution has been to make the zip250 a slave to the DVD writer. When I did this, on the first reboot, the BIOS reported no hard drives but the machine still booted from the SATA. Subsequently the SATA drive did appear in the BIOS.
Abins 4 months later:

The IRQ11 problem can be solved by giving acpi=off parameter to the kernel.
Jon Kukuk 4 months later:

I wish I had read this forum before buying the board. I use RHEL 3 and got it running pretty good except for one thing. I have spent hours researching why I can’t change the dma. I use Xine as the dvd player, and although it worked it is very choppy because of the dma setting:
```
# hdparm -d1 /dev/cdrom

/dev/cdrom:
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
 using_dma    =  0 (off)
```
I would not recomend using this board, or if you do, as a server only.
heavyboots 4 months later:

So the AMD64 Gentoo 2005.1 installer actually boots and detects the SATA drive now. Unfortunately, I have pretty much zero experience with Gentoo so I’m still working on getting an actual running install (I got as far as Grub config and I’m having fun with the fact that my boot partition is out at sda5 and Windows 2k is at sda1).

I also got Mandriva Linux running on this first shot. In fact, that’s how I got my partition map past the small Windows partition I put on it. Unfortunately, I was having trouble figuring out how to install drivers for a Hauppauge PVR150 card after the perfectly smooth install…

(Did I mention major linux n00bage?) :-)
scotsstuff@lesshaste.plus.com 5 months later:

Hi,

I have read all these posts with people getting more and more angry and just wanted to say that with a modern kernel and the ati-drivers (8.13.x + xorg 6.8.2 NOT 8.14.y) almost everything works perfectly on the MSI RS480M2.

Almost all problems have been fixed in 2.6.12 including working sata_sil support for sata drives (might actually have been fixed in 2.6.11). The reboot problems are even fixed in 2.6.13-rc-something.lm_sensors support for the fan speed is in 2.6.13-rc2. If you need to install from scratch and only have one drive which is sata just get a distro with a 2.6.12 (or 2.6.11?) kernel in its boot cd. Gentoo 2005.1 and Ubuntu colony 2 qualify as will many others in the near future I am sure.

I couldn’t get radeon X driver to work at all and vesa worked but had serious crashing problems with switching from X to a VT but I don’t care as the ATI-drivers work so well.

Very happy with my mobo! :)

Raphael
RS480M2 5 months later:

I think maybe you might be the only one running gento on this motherboard… cause I have booted off the gentoo 2005.1 and have not got past autodectecting devices.. and I have the lastest BIOS and I think you might have or forgot to mention about adding anything to the boot option cause I tried gentoo noapic etc… and still no go …. Please help me run a solid OS and not knoppix 4.0
Nes 5 months later:

Building Gentoo on this Mobo too. Also experiencing the same clock skew and reboot issues. Still struggling with kernel configuration to get everything working, but I must say that except for the already mentioned issues and some video/frambuffer and sound stuff I cannot get to work properly - the board seems okay. The install/Live CD can get framebuffer working perfect, but I have some jitter when displaying ncurses applications (like menuconfig or alsaconfig).
NEED HELP 5 months later:

Need Some help, so it says people are actually able to get it going on a distro, but I’m not able to get past auto detect using the latest BIOS 3.4 and using gentoo 2005 and tried 2005.1… Can someone give me instructions what do I use on boot… cause if I go gentoo noapic it locks up on sata_sil and if I just try to boot gentoo it locks up on autodetect using the livd CD… Or should I try another distro that will work…
josh 5 months later:

Try Ubuntu Breezy Badger (Colony 2 or 3). I believe kernel is 2.6.12something in the Colony 2 release, certainly in Colony 3. To get the clock to work right, you must pass the option “notimercheck” to the kernel on boot. Everything works (aside from the occasional nuttiness that comes from using a non-stable distro version).
josh 5 months later:

The option spelled “notimercheck” in the above message is actually “no timer check” with underscores instead of spaces. The comment software mangled it.
Joel Garske 5 months later:

Hi there… I read this heap of comments with much interest and you guys frightened me a lot! I wanted to buy this board for Music Creation (Realtime Multitrack Recording with Ardour, Jack etc… ) and wanted to give the X2 3800+ a try. The MSI Bios Updates today say that those Dual Core CPUs should work now, but i’m not quite sure if I can trust them. Has anyone tried that setup (for a similar purpose)? Has anyone tried the Realtime or Realtime preemption patches? I previously was running DeMuDi on a Celeron D 2.66 (IBM ThinkCentre A35) but that system had much too less power. Please do not recommend buying an NForce4… even not a passively cooled one. I need near zero noise and that nforce 4 prooved to be a classical noise maker previously (because it increases power consumtion and thereby noise)…

Thank you very much in advance.
Anurup 5 months later:

Hi Raphael,

This is regarding getting the ATI drivers for this board working…

You seem to have them working. There is some very contradictory stuff written on the release notes for the latest driver. It says that you need to have some XFree86 libraries installed to get it working - even for Xorg.

Can you tell me whether you had to do anything special to get the drivers running? I run FC 4 and that has Xorg by default. It seems a little weird to me to have to install some XFree86 libs on top of that. Did you have to do anything like that?

Would be much grateful to know. Thanks.
Anurup 5 months later:

Hi Guys,

3D acceleration works like a charm with the latest drivers for this board! You need to make the following changes to the xorg.conf generated by fglrxconfig:

1) Change XkbRules from “xfree86” to “xorg”. (There might be more than one occurrence of this)

3D needs the kernel module. So go to /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod and

2) Change “asm/ioctl32” in firegl_public.c to “linux/ioctl32”

Compile with sh make.sh. Move up a directory level. Run the install script. Then modprobe fglrx.

Then Rock’n’Roll!
Nes 5 months later:

I can confirm that 2.6.13 kernel resolves the reboot issues.
Nick Sch 5 months later:

If you use gentoo you can set ~amd64 for ck-sources and use the latest 2.6.13. I have DMA, no lockups, time is right, and I can reboot without chucking the power. Options I have in my grub.conf to make it all work:

pci=noacpi nolapic

Hope this is of some help as many of us came here from google. Thanks for the great thread

Nick valandnick(@)gmail…com
Luke Meyer 5 months later:

i wish i’d read this before getting my box built.

i just wanted to add to the litany of problems seen with this. i tried installing FC4-64 on my box. at first it would hang because i had a USB mouse plugged into it (disabling irq #185 or some such). found a tip about that and removed the mouse, install went fine. the computer won’t reboot, has to be manually cycled.

on reboot, it failed to load the OS, or even grub – error something like “error loading operating system”. i figured out this happens only if i set it up with LVM. without LVM, works fine with straight partitions or software RAID (i was hoping to run LVM on RAID). if anyone has any ideas on getting past this, i’d like to hear them.

the clock doesn’t seem to be running fast. i get VEGA video which isn’t purty, but i don’t care as i’m planning to use it as a headless server. haven’t bothered with sound either. no apparent problem w/ ethernet but i haven’t put any load on it. i have 4 160 GB SATA drives in it which seem to work fine, if not as zippy as I was hoping (formatting the RAID partition takes 15-20 minutes).

now i’m contemplating whether i should switch this mobo out for the MSI K8N NEO4-F + video card. will the box run without a video card? i could use another PCI card on other boxes…
Smart 6 months later:

I have mount the MSI RS480M2-IL in the Antec Aria Cube Case. It works.
Aphorism 6 months later:

Ok, after flailing with the mobo for quite a while and reading this page quite a few times…

VIDA LINUX 1.2 amd64 (www.vidalinux.com)

Vida is a Gentoo based distribution and I cannot tell you how much I like it. Make sure you run md5sum and compare the value to the md5 value at Vida to make sure the download went ok. Finally, test the installation cd (from options on boot disk) before you proceed (I had a bunged disk and it bombed the first time).

The install went flawlessly after all was said and done. Even have sound.

I am running an AMD64 3000+ Venice here with a standard IDE hard disk (sorry no SATA tests yet).

I don’t know if this impacted the install or not (further testing required):

*) In BIOS disabled APIC, set the other to USER DEFINED, and turned off AMD cool and quiet. *) Booted from CD and entered “linux noapic nolapic” as per this page.

Installed.

Hope this helps anyone out there. I would like to see if the install works without the above workarounds. Good luck.
Hirak Sarkar 6 months later:

I can’t install the linux fedora4 in msi motherboard.System hangs during the SATA_SIL Detection. My pc configaration is given below: MSI RS480 mainboard/ 3000+AMD cpu / 80Gb sata Baracuda Hard disk. please give me the actual patch file for overcome this problem.
lesshaste 6 months later:

It is simply because the kernel is not recent enough I suspect. Choose a distro with at least 2.6.12 in its installation cd. People have had sucess with the latest ubuntu colony cd for example. Or try opensuse on the 30th of Sep or any other distro with a 2.6.12+ kernel in its install cd.
Aphorism 6 months later:

FYI: Seems to install fine with the bios options enabled as well.
RichyF 6 months later:

Got 3 of these boreds, Having random problems with SATA booting.

Serious Timer issues.

System wont shut off or restart.

Serious Network Issues when running.

I am running a linux game server on one of them and it runs at twice the speed it should. noapic seemed to have fixed it but mid afternoon it went nuts again. I have tied to find another board but cant. Can i get it working with latest Centos? noapic hasnt worked would nolapic work?

Thanks
Aphorism 6 months later:

Ok clunking away with Gentoo and Vida…

STILL can’t get the blasted ati drivers to install cleanly. I know it is possible, but I can’t seem to do it. Anyone have any tips?

2.6.13+ solves the reboot issue. Adding notimercheck to your grub line will solve the timer issues without hacking the kernel source now as well.

Anurup? Can you post some detailed offerings? Thanks…
Aphorism 6 months later:

I have read that if you fritz the noapic in bios, the network CAN potentially clog up.

Try adding notimercheck to your grub line after you declare your root and all should be well regarding the clock.

I have ALL of my BIOS bits currently enabled, and the board appears to run fine. APIC, ACPI, AMD power bits… etc.

The reboot, as stated above, is fine under a 2.6.13+ kernel.
Anurup 6 months later:

Aphorism, a little held up. will get back in 24 hours time.

In the meantime try posting any error messages that you have while trying to install. Also ensure that you have the latest Xpress 200 drivers from the ATI website.

Sorry missed your message earlier.
Kevan Qureshi 6 months later:

This mobo truely sucks. I got a 400gb sata drive, 512mb ram and amd 64 3200. I first tried installing debian 3.1 amd64 which didnt work due to sata problems. Looks like this mobo needs > 2.6.11 Anyway, I tried FreeBSD 5.4 STABLE as well. Everything worked OK expect for the drive performance. It gave me UDMA33. I also tried bunch of other small things but it didnt gave me UDMA6. Last night I tried Slackware 10.2 and it worked in the end. I booted up with test26.s kernel and installed the modules from /testing directory at the ftp.slackware.com site. Everything seems to work OK. All tho, I have disabled ACPI in the bios. Here is my lspci output: 00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge 00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5a3f 00:11.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 437A Serial ATA Controller 00:12.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 4379 Serial ATA Controller 00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller 00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller 00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller 00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 04) 00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller ATI 00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge 00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] 02:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
lifeguard 6 months later:

All but reboot over here. ATI 8.16.20 drivers work like a charm. I use a Sound blaster pci card, and didn’t waste my time with the onboard sound, so can’t tell you if it works or not. I’m upgrading sources to 2.6.13_p6 to see if I can get a solid reboot.

This is gonna be the bomb digidity MythTV box. Everything else is up and running, minus my reboot b/s. My only hard-drive is a sata drive, working perfect, network is a charm, video is a blast, and what’s left? oh,….ONe shiza problem was memory. Started with dual channel Mushkin…the good stuff, but the board wouldn’t take the second stick. It would flutter out with seg faults at random intervals. Removing the stick fixed the problem. Ran memtest86 and worked fine. Took some dual channel Corsair memory out of my desktop machine and plopped it on the board and it works. Kinda confusing…

To say the least the boards given me a fun week of play. I installed with Gentoo 2005.0 cd. 2005.1 cd seems to have troubles all over the place. I distccd the entire build as well. There’s nothing like two amd64 systems building for another amd64 system…That’s just retarded awsome!

Overall….one of you posters put it best….Stop trying nine versions of linux and concentrate on one. Figure out why the damn thing doesn’t work, because if it works in one distro, you’re almost GUARANTEED it will work in another. You just have to ask it to, don’t expect it to. That’s why I love Gentoo. There’s no expecting. Shit doesn’t just work, you have to understand to a degree why it works or doesn’t work. Once you understand that, you learn to ask good questions, problem solving skills are upgraded, and you can begin to think for yourself and help others.
lifeguard 6 months later:

jimmidy jack! A quick emerge of ck sources brings in a naughty 2.6.13_p6 kernel, which gave my box the ability to cleanly reboot! I’m lovin’ it!
grey 6 months later:

I got Gentoo 2005.1 to boot. Here’s the deal:

I had to unplug my USB devices to get a boot that would work. I could boot with USB devices plugged in by using “noapic nolapic” but that yielded unusable SATA (they were mounted but had massive timeouts trying to read/write them making them unusable for practical purposes).

Unplugging my USB devices (keyboard/mouse) and using a normal keyboard lets me boot with only the “notimercheck” boot param. This boot config gives me normal access to SATA (and my normal I mean an hdparm figure of around 880MB/S for cached reads :-).

I tried and tried, but could not find a boot config that would let me use my USB keyboard and mouse AND my sata drives with the 2005.1 release.

So…

Without USB devices plugged in, here’s my boot setup:
- No changes to the BIOS (all options active)
- only “notimercheck” added as a boot param
My system:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ MSI RS480M2-IL 2 x Kingston 1GB (two matched dimms) 2 x Western Digital Raptor WD360 - SATA

Still haven’t finished my Gentoo build yet so can’t comment on video, sound, etc. But at least I can finally boot and get started on my build.
marcel 6 months later:

System: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ MSI RS480M2-IL 2GB RAM 1 x 250Gb SATA hdd

Upgraded bios to v3.8

Installed FC4 x64 yesterday, had to set kernel parameters to “notimercheck acpi=off pci=noacpi noapic” and disable acpi in the BIOS

Used yum to upgrade kernel to v2.6.13-1.1526_FC4 - which fixes the reboot problem.
Matt B 6 months later:

You’re right, after trying a few versions of Linux (SUSE, Ubuntu, Mandrake) I decided to concentrate on Windows XP and it worked like a charm :)

No manual setting of boot parameters, no disabling of features in BIOS, and everything just worked, so I could concentrate on getting stuff done rather than spend hours/weeks/months just trying to get my PC to boot.

When I need to use Linux, I run Cygwin.

Sure, it would have been nice to be able to dual boot into either Windows or Linux, but after having experienced some failed Linux installation attempts and having read of everyone else’s problems with this board, I decided it just wasn’t worth the time and effort.
Aphorism 6 months later:

Tried replacing the “asm/ioctl32” to “linux/ioctl32”, and despite compiling, still flails when you “modprobe fglrx”. There are apparently three unresolved symbols in the ioctl32 lib.
mustansar 6 months later:

hi, i recently bought a refurbished emachines(u can imagine why is it refurbished) So for my sake every thing is going fine with Fedora Core4. (clock skew i will fix, SATA i dont have, ) I will probably remove modem to spare an IRQ as well. So Point is what about the video card? Could any one get it to work? i cant get a vesa mode with 1024x768 but thats not very good coz i spent $400 on my new samsung LCD. people suggest loading via-agp module which i cant find. there is some kernel compile option does any one know? btw this blog is cool very focused. regards

Mustansar
Anurup 7 months later:

Aphorism,

It is vital that you remove all previous traces of the ATI (or third party) fglrx module/driver before trying this.

You’ll have to switch to runlevel 3 first. Then uninstall any previous rpms. (Do a search for previously installed versions with : rpm -qa | grep fglrx). Do an ‘rm -rf /lib/modules/fglrx’.

Also search your machine for fglrx.ko (use something like ‘locate fglrx | grep ko’) and remove anything that you might find.

Then give it another shot.

Switch back to runlevel 5 after you’re done.

Let me know what happens.
AA42 7 months later:

Hello, a quick report of the RS482-chipset version: clock skew is still there. But, kernel parameters (at boot time, no recompiling required) noapic and acpi=noirq seem to fix all the problems for me. SATA works, ethernet works, etc. Kernel 2.6.12.

So: in the grub parameters, add: noapic acpi=noirq

Integrated graphics seem to work with the bundled X.org 6.8.2 bundled driver. I’m not using any closed-source drivers, that is. 3D probably with 7.0 CVS.
azhreifje 7 months later:

I have a working T6212 machine now. I have SUSE Linux 10.0 (not the beta) running kernel 2.6.13-15-default for the x86_64 platform. I have a working network card (the 8139C has ping averages of ~0.25ms on a 100Mb LAN), the USB port will read my MemoryStick (only USB I’ve tested), and there is no clock skew.

I use the following boot-time parameters:

acpi=noirq pci=biosirq irqfixup nolapic

If you’re curious about the functioning of those, install the kernel source code and check out /usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt for the details.

I can be reached at azhreifje at gmail dot com, if anyone wants to know more about my hardware setup or other tests that I’ve done. I only check that account every few days, though, so be patient. :)
azhreifje 7 months later:

I spoke too soon. :( I had done numerous reboots to verify this information before posting. But apparently a cold boot changed something. I have also discovered that pci=biosirq is a no-op on x86_64, so it could never have had an effect. The other three options are enough to get the network working properly, but not USB. :(

I’ll post again when I get something figured out.
azhreifje 7 months later:

I have better news now. :)

It turns out that the options I used were 75% correct – the “pci=biosirq” should be replaced with “usb-handoff”.

After making that change, my machine will access the network, the clock, and the USB ports without errors or slowdowns.

So the final list is:

acpi=noirq usb-handoff irqfixup nolapic

Note that the order doesn’t matter. And this is for SUSE 10.0 using the 2.6.13-15-default x86_64 kernel. Other kernels (such as FC4 or Mandriva) will likely have different patches merged in, so these options may or may not have the same effect. Good luck!
tamal ghosh 7 months later:

What is the difference between msi rs480 &nsi rs 482? which one is better?
David Bein 7 months later:

You may have solved the UDMA33 problem, but if not I have patches for 2.6.9 and as well FreeBSD 5.4 stable. Let me know if you want the diffs and I’ll send them to you. I have a similar motherboard (MSI 7184 private Compaq) but the chips are the same and the behavior is (was) as you have described. I do not have IXP400 SATA working yet, but I also do not have an SATA drives to test it with. All of this is running on a Sempron 3400+ (64 bit chip).

–David

p.s. I am still working on the video issues, but disk issues were higher on the list for me. vesa mode in x.org 6.8.2 works for simple purposes.
Korak 7 months later:

Hi Scott, I am posting this from a remote part of India. I recently upgraded my PC with the Athlon64 3000+ 939pin and MSI RS482 MB. I had been having numerous problems trying to load and operate Windows98 on it and was searching the net for possible solutions when I chanced upon this page. It seemed like godsend, what with you loading Ubuntu on the very same configuration. I’ll cut things short from now…. I sownloaded the latest version for AMD64 and spun the CD just like you said. It was doing fine until it tried to load X Windows. I got the message ‘X Window could not load’ and got the option to see the detailed report. I’m pretty ordinary on Linux and this was the first time I even looked on a Linux screen so I am quite dumbfounded. Could you help me. I really liked Ubuntu’s manifesto on the net and I really want it to work on my system. Please help. Regards, Korak
Korak 7 months later:

Hi Scott and eveyone else posting on this page, Here’s a lil update on my problem: My motherboard is RS482 and not RS480. However, I don’t think that should be a problem. I checked Ubuntu forum:-Ubuntu Forums -Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10 -Ubuntu 5.10 Support (GNOME) -AMD 64 Users -Help! Ubuntu Wont Load! ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=85295 ). Nella89 has been having the same problem though her graphics chipset is a little different. I also didnt understand most of the jargon on this page. Any clues… Regards
Torfinn Ingolfsen 7 months later:

FYI, FreeBSD 6.0-release (both i386 and amd64) boots normally on this machine. No need for the ‘hint.apic.0.disabeled=”1”’ workaround any longer.
Aphorism 7 months later:

The ATI onboard graphics card does not work out of box with this board. Ubuntu knows about the problem.

If you want to get it to work, simply change the driver setting from

Driver =”ati” to Driver =”vesa”

in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

Other than that, it was working moderately better than my mini atx Foxconn nforce board I just bought. Grr… :)
Solop 8 months later:

I can confirm that the options given here do seem to work with Suse 10.0’s default x86_64 install (same eMachines T6212 machine). I can’t comment on the video, as I’m using an NVidia 6600 card with the proprietary drivers instead of the onboard video, but everything else seems to be OK – UATA and SATA drives are seen and used, as are the DVD burner and CD-ROM. I haven’t tried any USB storage devices yet, but the USB mouse and keyboard are fine.

The only problem I’ve had so far is a pair of occasions where the GUI freezes (the stock KDE installed by Suse). I can ssh into the machine just fine when this happens, but the gui is hung, and top shows X using 99.5% of the CPU. I’m trying various combinations of software to see if I can pin down what’s triggering it, but if anyone can offer suggestions, I’d be delighted to hear them.
azhreifje 8 months later:

My USB reader wasn’t working properly, so I’ve made some more changes:

acpi=noirq usb-handoff irqfixup nolapic

becomes:

pci=noacpi usb-no-handoff irqfixup nolapic

It’s still a little weird, though. Right after boot the USB reader for the MemoryStick(tm) works fine. But a couple days later, it isn’t seen by the system at all (normally the “inserted” light on the right comes on right away, then the LED embedded in the MemoryStick flashes indicating access). It might be that the automount daemon is dying; I’m going to take a snapshot of /proc/{cmdline,interrupts} and the output of “ps -leaf” for comparison when I see it stop working.

If you’re working on this and want to chat, my email address is in my previous post (#103 at 213 days).
Joshua Chambers 8 months later:

I know this is an old thread, but I am trying to get my new RS480 board to work with my onboard ATI Radeon Xpress 200 video.

I have tried installing the proprietary ATI modules, and have tried installing the Ubuntu modules (my distro), and all to no avail. I can use the fglrx driver, but the ATI control panel still doesn’t recongnize the card (chipset), listing unknown, and video, although it works, CRAWLS at full screen.

fglrxinfo reports:

OpenGL vendor string: Mesa project: www.mesa3d.org OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect OpenGL version string: 1.2 (1.5 Mesa 6.2.1)

and I can’t seem to make it say anything else, no matter what drivers I install. I hope someone can help me, thank you!

Joshua
Bread 9 months later:

my pc is running this mobo and it crashes with a blue screen and later i boot it up and send an error to microsoft and they say that my graphics card is causing the blue screen. my graphics card is evga’s geforce 6600 gt pci-e… why?
DILIP RAJ 9 months later:

SIR, Iam a second year btech student, my course has linux os in this year for the past two months i have been trying to install linux os on MSI-RS480M2(AMD athlon3200+) and I have only a SATA hard drive . so, please suggest me how to install any linux version on MSIRS480M2 with SATA hard drive
Anupam 10 months later:

I am using a smartlink 56k internal PCI modem.

I have just installed it on a new AMD system with MSI RS480M2 motherboard. Running Win Xp.

The problem is that whenever modem picks up the line it gives out a strange sound and the parallel phone also begins to ring peculiarly. the connection is never made.

this happens in every program be it bitware fax, hyper terminal etc.

Please suggest me what could be the problem and its solution.

thanks and regards Anupam
Alan 10 months later:

Have you tried upgrading to latest firmware? Yes, I know, basic questions, but had to ask.
yo 10 months later:

They are the same, the latter just uses a more modern fabrication technology (I think it is 90nm instead of 130nm or something like that). Both have the same performance, maybe the 482 is a little bit cooler, and is certainly cheaper to make.
prabu 10 months later:

hi dilip

i am prabu from pondicherry. i am a final year B.Sc. comp student. i too have the same board and problem as you. i am eagerly expecting Fedora 5 to solve the problem(i think it will solve!). but you can install any linux distribution in an ide hdd connected to the same board. if you need linux immediately buy or borrow an ide hdd and install it, it will work.

prabu mprabu@gmail.com
Henrik Nordstrom 10 months later:

The timer problem is fixed in recent Fedora Core 4 kernel updates, and all (timer, USB, network) should work without any extra kernel options.
fuckface 11 months later:

probably your vga-card drivers are digitally signed by the fuckers in Redmond.
fuckface 11 months later:

probably your vga-card drivers are NOT digitally signed by the fuckers in Redmond.
Saurabh 11 months later:

hi anurup,

i installed the latest drivers(v 8.22.5) from ati on my rs480m2 mobo running fc4. the trouble is that all my opengl applications run very slow. for example, i get a framerate of only 70-80 in glxgears.

anyone having any suggestions?
Genti about 1 year later:

use the 2.6.12 kernel from here http://tinyplanet.ca/~lsorense/amd64/

then for the vga use either the vesa driver or better (i have not tested it yet)

use the radeon but with option “NoAccel” “true”

good luck
Spike about 1 year later:

Hi Guys,

can anyone help me out here…

i bought a AMD 64 bit runnin on a MSI RS482 M4 7191 (which is also is similiar to RS482M4-ILD) and the problem is that–after booting up..in random intervals…i keep getting a total of nine beeps continuously…that means in groups of three…is there something wrong with ma comp!

~Spike~
Suraj about 1 year later:

Actually, the same stuff happens to me, but in Windows xp…i set it to “use DMA if available”, but it still remains in PIO mode…I cannot do anything while copying or playing dvds, and winamp gets very choppy even at realtime prioroty…dunno what to do…
Anurup about 1 year later:

Hi Saurabh,

glxgears is not to be trusted! Try fgl_glxgears. Also check the output of fglrxinfo to see whether the “ATI” string appears anywhere or not.
Anurup about 1 year later:

Joshua,

It means that your driver hasn’t been accepted. You should not be seeing the Mesa string but the ATI string - that’s a confirmation tha tyour driver has intalled properly.
JohnnyO about 1 year later:

After reading all 114 posts on this topic, I decided to run Up2Date on my Whitebox Linux installation. After a couple hours of downloading and installing, I rebooted, and SATA drivers worked perfectly. I had previously added ‘noapic nolapic’ to the grub.conf kernel parameter. Not sure if that helped…
I haven’t tested sound, since this is for a server, but the only issue remaining for me is why there are so many ‘Losing some ticks… checking if CPU frequency changed.’ entries in dmesg. Any ideas?
TJD about 1 year later:

Just wanted to thank everyone who gave great advice on here. I’m still trying to work out my SATA problems, but this has helped me immensely.
Ntsike about 1 year later:

It don’t seem like the mesa drivers should be showing up. If I had to make a guess, I’d say the problem is in the firmware your on your motherboard. Have you considered updating the BIOS?
shivani about 1 year later:

Hello Pls help me AS I AM NEW TO LINUX I HAVE PROBLEM TO install RHEE on ATI RS 480M2 K8939, I AM USING TWO SATA HARDDISK. currently I am working with window XP and Mandriva 2006. I also want to install red hat but it isn’t detecting my harddrive. please help me out
hp7330n about 1 year later:

The hp7330n multi media pc, uses this board by MSI the MS 7184.

This seams to run a version of redhat, called scientic linux. They have a live dvd or cd you can try.

The TV tuner card soldering looks terrible, as well the HP 840B dvd drive can have problems. So these system might be found for very little and be useable once the problem parts are removed.
saini.parveen@gmail.com about 1 year later:

I want to know that i have a Amd64bit 3000+ cpu and 512MB RAM and Msi Rs482m4 mbd on this mbd ihve Driver problems like sound driver’s not supporting. when i installed the driver then some time it is asking for winxp versions like winxp 5.0 somthing and winxp 64 bit or 32 bit. but i wnt to know wht is the actual problem in this mbd.

Psaini
Psaini about 1 year later:

or some times when i installed the driver’s then it is currupting my windows.

Please help me out

Thnx Psaini
Alex about 1 year later:

I am still having problems with this board under linux!

I have uprated the bios to “W7093AMS V3.9 021306 12:13:04” and I am using Ubuntu with kernel version 2.6.15-27-amd64-generic. I get kernel panics while compiling mythtv and running the locale def command. For example, the command: sudo localedef -i esGB -c -f UTF-8 esGB.UTF-8 will cause a kernel panic. The system locks up, often the screen shows coloured lines. On one occasion I did see a message that said “Kernel panic - not syncing”. I can’t reproduce this to find the exact message though. Can anybody help? Does anyone have similar problems?

Thanks,

Alex
Edmond Hui about 1 year later:

Just want to report that I am running a Fedora Core 6 box with this m/b with a AMD64 X2 3800+. So far it’s running great without problem. I even able to use the on-board RAID controller to setup a RAID 1 . I am stilling having one problem that crash the box when burning DVD, but I have not figure out what is the issue. BTW, i was having loads of problem previously when running FC4…..
seshu about 1 year later:

hi group, i am having amd athlon64 3000+ on msi rs480m2-il board with 1gb ram.asusual always has problem with linux-installation with sata enabled(getting irq 11 error) and i am not getting the 1gb ram performance on windows also.it is hardly using 350mb of ram even though i changed VM to ‘0’.what i am supposed to do atleast to have better performance on win xp(sp2).plz help me out.any suggestions mail me to seshu125@yahoo.com.

scottstuff