I was not expecting to have any problems in this area as the D380 is relatively new (2008) and is based on a bog standard Intel Celeron processor. However this wasn't the case. As noted on the firmware page the D380 is restricted in what media it will boot and so I ended up creating a number of hard disk based distributions for testing. (I bought some cheap cast-off 6GB 2.5" drives a while ago - ideal for this situation).
Note: I have full network connectivity if I put the DOM back on the IDE interface and boot XPe. This shows that there is no hardware problem - just a driver one.
I happened to have DSL 4.4.9 installed on a hard disk and so I plugged that into the IDE interface. This booted but never got anywhere. Rebooting but removing the quiet parameter let me see at what point it died. The screen showed:
testing the IO APIC..........................
An unexpected IO-APIC was found. If this kernel release is less than
three months old please report this to linux-smp@xxxx.xxxxxx.xxx
.....................................done
PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing
isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: No Plug & Play device found
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based on Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Starting kswapd
VFS: Disk quotas vdquot_6.5.1
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
keyboard: Timeout AT keyboard not present?(ed)
keyboard: Timeout AT keyboard not present?(f4)
floppy0: no floppy controllers found
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta4-2.4
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
SIS5513: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:02.5
SIS5513: chipset revision 1
SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffe0-0xffe7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
Researching with Google I found on one of the forums:
From my browsing, it looks like they are using 2.4.31, which was released in June, 2005, so it's more than 3 months old. However, this "unexpected IO-APIC" message is not fatal and has been removed from current 2.6.x kernels completely. Whatever problem DSL has, it has nothing to do with that message. If your computer hardware is new, a Linux 2.4 kernel might not be able to handle it properly. For DSL issues, please use their forums.
Nothing else useful turned up.
Booting Tinycore 3.0 from a hard disk was apparently successful...until I noticed the network was not working. Checking the dmesg output I found at the end:
EXT4-fs (hda1): mounted filesystem without journal r8169: eth0: link up ------------[ cut here ]------------ WARNING: at net/sched/sch_generic.c:255 0xc034f714() Hardware name: D380 NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0 (r8169): transmit queue 0 timed out Modules linked in: squashfs ramzswap loop video backlight scsi_wait_scan output serio_raw r8169 Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.33.3-tinycore #2012 Call Trace: [<c0128285>] ? 0xc0128285 [<c034f64d>] ? 0xc034f64d [<c01282ca>] ? 0xc01282ca [<c034f714>] ? 0xc034f714 [<c013a661>] ? 0xc013a661 [<c01138e2>] ? 0xc01138e2 [<c0113ab5>] ? 0xc0113ab5 [<c01402ff>] ? 0xc01402ff [<c012fbb4>] ? 0xc012fbb4 [<c012c1af>] ? 0xc012c1af [<c012c252>] ? 0xc012c252 [<c012c5d4>] ? 0xc012c5d4 [<c0114204>] ? 0xc0114204 [<c03bd06a>] ? 0xc03bd06a [<c0118e48>] ? 0xc0118e48 [<c01083c0>] ? 0xc01083c0 [<c01017e9>] ? 0xc01017e9 [<c04e97de>] ? 0xc04e97de ---[ end trace ca4a3122f793c8da ]--- r8169: eth0: link up
...so there is a problem there as well, but associated with the ethernet device(?)
I'd recently removed a 3.5" drive from a P4 system of mine. This had been been running Fedora Core 13. Plugging this in resulted in another failure. Rebooting after removing the quiet option showed:
... TCP cubic registered Initialising XFRM netlink socket NET: Registered protocol family 17 Using IPI No-Shortcut mode registered taskstats version 1 No TPM chip found, activating TPM-bypass!
...another disappointment as everything died at that point.
Finally I had a go with the latest Ubuntu (having installed it to a hard disk). This booted ok, but like the Tinycore example, I had no working network connection and no real indication of what the problem was.
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32-24-generic (buildd@rothera) (gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) )
#39-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jul 28 06:07:29 UTC 2010 (Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.39-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5)
.....
[ 0.097115] CPU0: Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.00GHz stepping 08
[ 0.100001] Brought up 1 CPUs
[ 0.100001] Total of 1 processors activated (1999.94 BogoMIPS).
.....
[ 2.652556] r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.3LK-NAPI loaded
[ 2.652681] r8169 0000:05:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 2.652828] r8169 0000:05:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 2.652898] alloc irq_desc for 27 on node -1
[ 2.652903] alloc kstat_irqs on node -1
[ 2.652927] r8169 0000:05:00.0: irq 27 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 2.654776] eth0: RTL8168c/8111c at 0xdc8f6000, 00:e0:c5:49:02:bf, XID 1c2000c0 IRQ 27
.....
[ 26.595305] udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth1
.....
[ 30.041565] r8169: eth1: link up
[ 30.468499] alloc irq_desc for 18 on node -1
[ 30.468509] alloc kstat_irqs on node -1
.....
[ 40.116060] eth1: no IPv6 routers present
So there appears to be a definite problem with the drivers for the Ethernet interface.
Any comments? email me. Last update August 2010