Data-corruption bug hits VIA chipsets
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Posted in Channel, 12th April 2001 11:53 GMT
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Updated VIA has confirmed a data-damaging glitch in its 686B Southbridge chip - a major part of the Taiwanese company's KT-133A chipset - and is working with mobo makers to prepare BIOS updates to fix the problem.
The southbridge part is used in the vast majority of AMD Athlon-oriented mobos, primarily the KT-133, but it can be used with northbridge parts from the Apollo Pro 133, KX-133A and AMD-76x chipsets too. VIA said it is investigating the problem to see how many chipsets are affected.
The bug was uncovered by German hardware site Au-Ja! It's not exactly a common problem: the date corruption affects large, 100MB and up file transfers between two hard drives connected to separate IDE channels exchanging the data by DMA. Having a Creative Labs Soundblaster Live card in place seems to exacerbate the problem.
VIA's BIOS fix works by adjusting a number of PCI settings, which, according to Tecchannel, suggests the problem is a result of competitive PCI access.
VIA told The Register that it is a BIOS issue, and it will be posting a fix on its Web site sometime next week. ®
Related Links
Au-Ja's initial report (in German)
Tecchannel's summary (in German)
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