“…The best way to exploit the new chipsets on this A7V133
motherboard is to use the 2.4 kernel. The older kernels don’t take
advantage of the UDMA100 IDE controller and drives. Unfortunately,
there are some problems with the new motherboards and the newest
kernels, and sometimes they feed off of each other.”
“Reiserfs isn’t fully debugged in the new 2.4 kernels. I
happen to be a very big fan of Reiserfs; I use it on all my
machines. But I notice that when I upgrade my kernel to fix some of
the most recently discovered Reiserfs bugs, suddenly my 3Com 3C905B
card goes bahooties and starts generating tons of error
messages.“
“I eventually find out that the Linux kernel folks blame this
behavior on a motherboard PCI BIOS setting. They’re probably right,
but I don’t know this at the time, so I assume the new kernel PCI
driver simply doesn’t like the 3C905B card. I can’t afford to
sacrifice the Reiserfs fixes to go back to a previous kernel
version, and I don’t want to back-port the Reiserfs fixes manually.
So I swap the 3Com network interface card (NIC) for an Intel
EtherExpress Pro 100 NIC from another machine that is using a
different PCI chipset.”