GA-970A-UD3P and USB devices simply don't work on linux

[mtruchado]

Hi

I was looking for help after none of my USB 2.0 on my brand new (I bought it yesterday) GA-970A-UD3P works on linux.

First of all I tried all the bios configuration checks possible, and then I gave up after I couldn't fix the problem.

I saw in this post:

http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,14802.0.html

that there are other AMD motherboards with the same problem. Just look in google for the problem in google, a lot of motherboards, specially from gigabyte and MSI have this problem. A few asus also got this problem.

The only way to fix it is with a BIOS update.

As a workaroud, use the VIA ports provided with this mobo, hopefully you have 2 back and 2 fron (via front panel). In the meantime we need your help Gigabyte!, we need a new bios with the latest AMD AHCI bios ROM and USB compatibility fixes.

I saw that you are starting to do the job, as motherboards like GA-970A-DS3P are getting the update.

I got this motherboard as a replacement for my old ASUS M5A97 EVO R2.0, which  also has this problem, but It was fixed last may with a bios update.

Question: is there any BIOS for the GA-970A-UD3P mobo on the way?, there is only one, F1, and It is quite old.

also please note, the mouse is slow as hell when I enter the bios, this shoould be also fix.

Thanks and regards.

[mtruchado]

Hmmm, interesting, on the other thread looks like the MoBo GA-990FXA-UD7 was faulty. Mine could have the same problem as well as the symptoms are the same. I will return it for a RMA.

Let's see.

[mtruchado]

Hi

So, the motherboard is here back!, RMA was resolved, they told me that there is nothing wrong with the MoBo, so, I guess I need a bios update from you gigabyte  , already the MoBo GA-970A-DS3P got the new bios F2h which improves the compatibility with USB devices, looks like the model GA-970A-UD3P suffers exactly the same issue

Question: is there any plans to do the same bios update for the model GA-970A-UD3P?

Thanks in advance.

[procersapientiae]

Good news! I found a forum, that discussed how to fix this issue! Simply enable IOMMU in the original BIOS. 
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2178596

[BrianSmith]

Updating this thread with my experiences of the 970A-UD3P under LINUX (CentOS7).

As posted by procersapientiae, the USB peripheral and some hanging issues were solved by getting working IOMMU settings. For me that meant enabling IOMMU on the peripherals screen in the BIOS and passing

amd_iommu=soft iommu=soft

options to the kernel on boot. (see
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/System_Administrators_Guide/sec-Customizing_GRUB_2_Menu.html#sec-Editing_an_Entry
for how). amd_iommu=on alone did not seem to do the trick.

I had other issues that caused frequent lock ups that were:

AMD microcode for my FX 8350 CPU is not in the RHEL/CentOS packages so grabbed the files from
http://www.amd64.org/microcode.html
see also
https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=7331
.

The system was still unstable and the the comment "Note: Only one DIMM per channel is supported for DDR3-1866MHz and higher speed as using an AM3+ CPU" in the supported memory document
http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList/Memory/mb_memory_ga-970a-ud3p.pdf
made me wonder if there was an issue with high speed memory in general (I'm using Kingston HX318C10FB/4 which is 1866 clock speed, and not on the supported list - but it's a pretty slim list!). I first decreased the memory multiplier in the BIOS to run at 1600, which was better, but still flaky. I had seen somewhere else reports of slightly increased memory voltages helping, so I increased the DRAM voltage to 1.52 V in the BIOS. System now seems to be better, but has just locked up on me again. 

I think there are still issues with the onboard NIC and it would be nice if there was a BIOS update to solve the IOMMU issues.