Re: Athlon PSE/AGP Bug

[Tom Hornyak <linux-geek@hornyaksys.com>]

There is a known bug in AMD processors and using AGP - info was posted
on slashdot.org and www.gentoo.org.
In short, fix by passing mem=nopentium to the kernel aat boot time
(using GRUB or LILO)

Gustavo Zacarias wrote:
> 
> Rene Rebe wrote:
> 
> > Here I only see one Athlon system crashing all the time. This is a
> > 700Mhz Duron runnign in a Asus A7V. With a 2.4.16 kernel compiled with
> > Athlon optimization all applications are crashing all time (sed, cc,
> > gcc, sawfish - all. Simply sig-11), with a 2.4.4 kernel (using the
> > same .config) it seem to run just fine. 4 passes of memtest86 showed
> > no error, either ...
> >
> > I see the broken via chips involved most of the time.
> >
> > We will try a i386-only optimized kernel tomorrow.
> 
> Hmmm... i'm running a Thunderbird 800 on an A7V (not the A7V133) without
> any major problems, with 2.4.17 and athlon optimized.
> Of course i have the latest BIOS from Asus (1009), with earlier ones i
> did have some AGP-related instabilities, with a GeForce2 GTS.
> Of course i also flashed the GF2, just the combination of both things
> solved my problems, though now my ASUS GF2 is a "generic nvidia" one.
> I compiled on the same run a full XFree86 4.2.0 + GNOME 1.4 without
> even one coredump / sig-11, and this is a FULLY compiled gnome.
> I have 2 out of 3 dimm slots populated with 256+64 pc133 dimms,
> el cheapo brand, and pass memtest86 without a hitch.
> HDD is an issue... i got en masse corruption once, but then it's no
> wonder with the good record IBM's 75GXP's have... (somehow traced
> to ext3+unmask irq on). It corrupted beyond his limits, destroying
> the windos partition data also. Now i'm with ext3 but without unmasking,
> and got no corruption so far.
> I'm using NVIDIA_kernel #2314 forced to AGP 4x w/ SBA & FW on,
> though no serious 3D load beyond xscreensaver eyecandy, with no
> problems whatsoever.
> Distro is (kinda) redhat 7.2, everything compiled with gcc 2.96, EXCEPT
> xfree that doesn't like it very much (which was compiled with 2.95.3).
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-- 

Tom Hornyak
linux-geek@hornyaksys.com
www.hornyaksys.com