FIX Asus K8V Deluxe SE AMD64 DMA freezes

[d matrix]

I posted this in the AMD64 section of the Ubuntu
Forums (ubuntuforums.org), but do not know how much
traffic it gets. So I am posting this on this list as
well. I hope this helps someone else.

I have been running Ubuntu on my brand new AMD64
hardware since Warty preview release came out.
Everything has been working great but one small issue.


Here is my hardware:

ASUS K8V Deluxe SE (Bios 1003)
1 gig DDR
Nvidia Ti4200
onboard sound and NIC
Ubuntu Warty upgraded to the latest kernel.
linux-amd64-k8

I was experiencing odd little freezes of around 10 -
20 secs of duration during heavy load. This was not
really apparent until I really pushed the system by
having a dozen torrents open, dvd burning, ogg
playing, web surfing, copy stuff from IDE cdroms. It
was really starting to get annoying, so I started to
look thru /var/log/syslog. This is what I found:

Oct 12 08:26:25 localhost kernel: hda:
dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x24
Oct 12 08:26:35 localhost kernel: hda: DMA interrupt
recovery
Oct 12 08:26:35 localhost kernel: hda: lost interrupt

I do not use the SATA yet just the IDE. I have 4 IDE
devices on here that were working fine in my old
Athlon 2000. Here are more:

Oct 12 08:27:38 localhost kernel: hdc: lost interrupt
Oct 12 08:28:23 localhost kernel: hdb: lost interrupt

I would get these errors about my cdrom devices under
heavy load even when not using these devices. Very
odd. The system would freeze until the IDE device was
reset. I have not lost any data yet or noticed any
corruption, yet...

So I tried the usual disable ACPI and APIC to see if
that resolved any issues. In my case disabling APIC
did nothing and disabling ACPI made it so my system
would not boot. It would freeze loading the
orinoco_pci driver.

After a bit of googling I came across a post of a
Fedora user with the same motherboard having the same
issues. He said to put this in the Grub.conf file at
the end of the kernel line (/boot/grub/menu.lst on
Ubuntu):

noapic pci=usepirqmask

Having placed this in my menu.lst file and rebooting
my heavy load IDE DMA reset issues are gone. 

I hope this will help any other AMD64 users on this
motherboard having this issue as it is quite annoying.
>From posts I have read this also affects SATA devices
too.

Is there any way to make Ubuntu detect this
motherboard and setup grub properly so other users
will not have this issue?

As well every time the kernel updates my menu.lst file
is overwritten. Is there any way to have this set
every time the kernel updates?

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