mark.wilkinson@2pmtech.com writes:
Hi Bari,
I have the plain old VIA EPIA (800/5000) working a good 80 % of the time.
Not sure if my problems are buggy northbridge setup or buggy motherboard - it generates some spurious serial at power on, and sometimes hangs reading the smbus to size the ram.
The spurious serial at power on. (Assuming it is just a character) sounds like normal line noise.
As for smbus they seem to be the most common board problem I have seen. Last time I trace one down it really was a board design defect, and made using lmsensors on that board impossible. In any event it is not terribly hard to put in timeouts and board resets to get past smbus problems.
Although if you are having problems 20% of the time that is much more often then I have seen problems on other boards. Usually I see problems closer to the 1% mark.
Eric