Re: VIA VT8237A Southbridge Advice

Grok Mogger wrote:
Bruno Buys wrote:
Grok Mogger wrote:
Hey everyone,

I'm looking into building a new machine. As for the motherboard, I'm interested in an ASUS 'A8V-VM SE'. Unfortunately, in Googling I've seen people complain about problems with the board's southbridge. It's a 'VIA VT8237A'.

I went to kernel.org and started looking through the change logs wondering if perhaps I'd be able to find something about support being added to the kernel for this chipset. Lo and behold, I did!

I searched this changelog...
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.19

And found the following two snippets that seem to indicate that there is support in the kernel for this southbridge as of the 2.6.19 kernel.

Snippet 1:
----------------------------------------------------
Author: Rudolf Marek <r.marek@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun Sep 3 22:35:21 2006 +0200

i2c-viapro: Add support for the VT8237A and VT8251

i2c-viapro: Add support for the VT8237A and VT8251

Documentation update included. Compile tested.
----------------------------------------------------

Snippet 2:
----------------------------------------------------
Author: Jay Cliburn <jacliburn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon Aug 7 22:08:30 2006 -0500

[PATCH] sata_via: Add SATA support for vt8237a

This patch adds support for the VIA Technologies VT8237A SATA controller,
used, for example, on the ASUS M2V socket AM2 motherboard.
----------------------------------------------------


Unfortunately, Debian uses the 2.6.18 kernel. I'm somewhat lost from here. Does anyone have any advice for me?

Even if I can add support for my Southbridge somehow, if the default Debian kernels don't include support for my Southbridge, then I won't be able to install Debian, right? Because the installer won't be able to write to my SATA hard disk.

Anyway, I'm really clueless from here and would appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction. =)

Thanks!
- GM


Hi Grok,
Unless the *A brand of the chipset is a lot different, you shall not have any surprises. This is my lspci for it:

00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]


The board is an Abit kv8-pro, for amd64, with amd64's etch, kernel 2.6.18-3-amd64 and a sata disk. Works nicely.



Hey Bruno,

Thanks for taking the time to read all that, I know it was a long post. =)

Unfortunately, from my Googling, I'm under the impression that it IS a very different chipset. I could be wrong, but unfortunately I don't have any way to find out. (Maybe some nice person with a working VT8237A Southbridge will find this and tell me it works? =P )

Thanks for letting know about your board, processor, and chipset though, that's definitely helpful.

- GM


Trying a livecd is the way to go here. There's knoppix and kanotix which are debian based, might give you a good idea.

Compiling the kernel isn't really scary, there are debian packages to build kernels, did you see kernel-package, under 'apt-cache search'? But you can also compile from kernel.org sources, if you wish.










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