64 bit kernel

[Stan Gammons <s_gammons@charter.net>]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone can tell me if the following is a 64 bit
kernel problem or if it's a BIOS problem.

I have a Gigabyte K8NSC-939 with an AMD64 3200+ (Venice) CPU version F7
BIOS. When I first got this board, I put a single 512 Mb PC2700 DIMM in
it from an older Celeron board I had. 32 bit Suse 10.0 and 32 bit FC4
loaded fine. When I tried the 64 bit version of either, I kept getting
DMA errors on boot like the HD or controller was bad. After some
searching I found others with similar problems and they had to use
"noapic nolapic" kernel boot options to install and boot the OS. That
worked for me too and I was able to install the OS.

After I upgraded the memory and put 2 512Mb PC3200 DIMMS in the board. I
tried a 64 bit install again. This time I no longer had to use the
"noapic nolapic" options. With a single DIMM, BIOS (during boot)
reported "single channel" memory. With 2 DIMMS, BIOS (during boot)
reports "dual channel" memory. My question though is does the 64 bit
kernel require "dual channel" memory or is this a BIOS problem?  



Stan