GIGABYTE GA-970A-DS3 motherboard not working with 64 bit kernel

[Luke3026]

Thanks, that helps eliminate the obvious. Next question, when you attempt to install the 64-bit distro or the 32-bit, does it find the nic and connect to the internet during installation, there is a screen that asks about connecting to the internet to download updates during installation.

I'd still like to see what the machine thinks it has or doesn't have for a nic. The OP stated that when he ran off the 32-bit live cd everything worked, but when he tried to actually install it then things began failing. If the networking situation could be resolved, a backports repository might resolve the USB situation

On a 64-bit install (or running a live 64-bit distro disc), it sees the onboard NIC but right away tells me I'm "disconnected". Checking further, it identifies the nic correctly, however it never actually connects. Tried DHCP -- never gets an IP (and yes I checked all router settings). Manually set the IP -- can't ping anything. But unlike the original poster, I stuck in a PCI nic and it connected right away. If not for the additional USB issues, I would have lived with it like that.

Running a 32-bit live CD or, what I eventually did, a 32-bit install, onboard nic connects right off the bat and all USB ports work.

[Grinage]

http://www.amd.com/us/products/embed...ux-supprt.aspx

I was able to find support documentation all the way up to the previous release for both 32 bit and 64 bit os kernels. Just not this particular chipset, there's a new kernel release pending, and the updated support for the chipset will probably be with it.


There is information about 32bit linux kernels if you dig around long enough, just not 64 bit so hopefully this will be patched quickly.

[Grinage]

A thought, following up on the post about the launchpad bug for another motherboard, I remembered that there was a nightmare of updates from the install kernel version to the most current stable release in the repos. The kernel on the installer cd doesn't have those updates. The docs on AMD's site are only a few weeks old, the patch may have already been implemented, kernel 3.8 is in heavy testing for Unbuntu's next release I think they're on rc5 now, but 3.7.5 is available for download from the stable repositories. This is a shot in the dark but if you download the x64 kernel packages for 3.7.5, headers and images files, burn them to a cd or put them on an external drive install the 64 bit OS and then manually install the debs you downloaded from Ubuntu using dpkg if it installs completely it might resolve the issue. If you've tried this or something similar post again. For this to work you'd probably also need some library files if you're willing to try this lengthy method I'll try and post a full list of files and dependencies.

[qwertybyrd]

I am having the same problem with the NIC, but I discovered that if you plug the usb keyboard into one of the two usb3 ports on the back, the keyboard/mouse will work.

[Grinage]

If you can use a secodnary nic and get online you should be able to address the USB issue. There also seems to be a persistent issue with the onboard nic itself for this board for windows and linux. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll have the completed list of packages and dependencies if you want to attempt to force an updated kernel install to see if this resolves the issues.

[Grinage]

Sorry this took so long to post, it's not just a few boards out there with these problems it's a whole bunch of them, and I've spent the past two days dealing with angry customers who upgraded to previously trusted and recommended brands. I'll recap the issue we ran across, and the solutions and then at the end list the kernel packages.

Issue 1: The system boots and installs normally with any 32 bit OS, but when a 64 bit OS is installed the network card no longer functions correctly or at all. This has been seen in only intel / realtek built-in nics so far regardless of board make and model.

Solution1: Turns out that for about a third of these the problem is that there is some sort of bug in the nic itself so that the 64 bit Linux OS identifies the built-in as eth1 instead of eth0 and the interfaces file is built by default for eth0. Altering the file to reflect eth1 instead of eth0 resolved this 90 percent of the time.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

or your favorite editor as root

Issue 2: Because of the glitch, the OS is trying to use USB2.0 slots as eth0 in some cases.

Solution2: Disable the on board NIC in the BIOS and use a PCIe network card, this usually addresses both Issues unless you're pcie network card is the same intel / realtek card. In around 70% of the machines I've seen, if we can get the machine on line and run all the recent updates all the USB issues have been resolved after disabling the on board NIC. (microsoft has several security patches to resolve this, you will have to download them from microsoft and install them manually for windows users)

Issue 3: Some Boards apparently made it through production with very old BIOS and many things aren't working in either windows or linux.

Solution3: Before attempting to use your machine functionally you will have to go out to the manufacturer's website and download the latest flash and some of these are only a few days old so it seems that manufacturers are getting on the ball here, some aren't and we've had to advise these even angrier customers at this point to return their MOBO's. If however, your board does have an update, installing it is going to be critical. The problem is that some of these updates and flashes only work in a windows environment, and if you don't happen to have a mswindows install cd lying around or a handy windows emulated flash drive installing the updates is difficult, and installing windows so you can then erase it to install linux seems counterproductive to me, if yor're considering a dual boot system now is the time to plan it out if you have to do this.

Issue4: Onboard Nic only functions in DHCP mode, if a static route is required it drops packets or ceases to function or some combination thereof.

Solution4: This is due to the issues with the card itself and not configuration settings or the kernel, the only solution to this is to disable the nic and use a drop in.


As promised if you want to manually install an updated kernel after install, you will need these packages from ubuntu:
linux-headers-3.5.0-23
linux-image-generic
linux-image-3.5.0-23-generic
linux-image-extra-3.5.0-23-generic
linux-firmware
coreutils

latest version of
dpkg
libac1
libattr1
libc6
libselinux1
libpci3
zlib1g
multiarch-support
pciutils
liblzma5
tar
libbz2-1.0
libkms1
libdrm2
linux-firmware-nonfree
libapm1

You can download these as debs directly from Ubuntu, make sure you get the 64bit versions, you can then install your 64 bit OS and using a terminal browse to the location where you have the files a flash drive or cd/dvd and use

 sudo dpkg -i *

to install all the packages in that location.

So far only six boards have required us to go to such an extreme, but it did allow us to get online either via PCI drop in or getting the onboard to work as eth1, dpkg may tell you that it breaks all sorts of dependencies, this is alright once you are online

 apt-get update

 apt-get upgrade

and

 dpkg-reconfigure -a

resolve almost all broken packages and it wasn't a big deal to manually fix one or two that needed extra tweaking in some cases.

On that note there have been twenty boards from various manufacturers that we couldn't do anything with at all. There does seem to be another multitude of patches forthcoming in the next major kernel release. That may patch around all of these issues approriately, but as far as I know it's still only in the beginning rc stages so it could be some time before the next stable kernel is released, or it could be tomorrow, I'm sure someone in the forums is keeping up with it.

I'm sure this isn't the end of this. If other less complicated and time consuming solutions are out there Please Post!

[monkblah]

Just wanted to add to this thread in case in helps someone -- I have also been experiencing this bug (Networking and USB not working with 64-bit Linux kernels on the Gigabyte 970A-D3 Rev. 3.0 motherboard). I originally posted about it in this thread if you want gory details.

Note that my motherboard is a D3, not a DS3, though they are almost identical.

Also note my motherboard is Rev. 3.0. The Revision is important as it has a different bios than the earlier Revs; also, I did not have this problem with the earlier Rev that I used briefly.

Further note, 32-bit kernels work fine, it's only the 64-bit ones that don't have successfull Networking and USB.

And further note - the same problem exists in the current 13.04 Raging 64-bit kernel as well.

The good news: I was able to get my system working by setting IOMMU to ENABLED in the bios (it was set to disabled by 'optimized settings'/defaults).

YMMV. I figured out that I should play with this setting by going through this thread and the similar launchpad bug mentioned earlier ( ), though I don't know if anyone else solved it by the same method.

Not 100% sure where this bug should be reported to. Its not strictly a Ubuntu bug, it affects all 64-bit kernels (that I tried, at least). I guess it might be considered primarily a gigabyte bug. Not sure. I do feel, though, that it would be better if the kernel gave some more useful warning / debug messages in this case so people could diagnose it better. I ended up spending many hours working on this.

[andyhelloween]

Note that my motherboard is a D3, not a DS3, though they are almost identical.

Thanks for this! I was going to buy that motherboard for an ubuntu server installation... keep looking now...

cheers.

[sanderj]

Not 100% sure where this bug should be reported to. Its not strictly a Ubuntu bug, it affects all 64-bit kernels (that I tried, at least). I guess it might be considered primarily a gigabyte bug. Not sure. I do feel, though, that it would be better if the kernel gave some more useful warning / debug messages in this case so people could diagnose it better. I ended up spending many hours working on this.

I would report it on launchpad, certainly because of the 32/64-bit dependency. Because it is a kernel bug, someone will say "upstream bug".

Reporting a bug is easy:

ubuntu-bug linux

That will collect and fill-out all your system info.

HTH

[monkblah]

Hi again Sanderj. Yeah, I've already been trying to report it on launchpad, but apport doesn't seem to want to cooperate. Posted a question about it to launchpad here.

You wouldn't happen to know if this is a known problem with apport for Live CDs or somesuch, would you?