----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Costolo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "GNHLUG" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, January 21, 2002 9:43 PM Subject: Re: Anybody running 2.4 and AMD???
> Hmm. I'm running a 1 GHz Athlon with kernel version 2.4.3 (a la Mandrake > 8.0) and a 32 MB NVidia TNT2 AGP video card (and XFree 4.0.3 if it matters) > on an ABIT KT7A-RAID mobo with 512 MB RAM. I have not experienced any random > lockups. I know nothing about the stock Mandrake kernel and haven't tried > "rolling my own" yet (but I will, once I learn more about the process). > You don't need to recompile to avoid the bug. From the article: "Fortunately, there is a quick and easy fix for this problem. If you have been experiencing lockups on your Athlon, Duron or Athlon MP system when using AGP video, try passing the mem=nopentium option to your kernel (using GRUB or LILO) at boot-time. This tells Linux to go back to using 4K pages, avoiding this CPU bug." > Are these lockups truly random? The article doesn't go into too much detail. If you've read the article, you know as much as I do, except here is another link to AMD's site, http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871,00.html then click on the "Microsoft Windows 2000 patch for AGP applications." AMD describes it as a Windows 2000 problem, but in reality it is a problem which affects any OS that uses the extended paging feature of Pentium class and later processors. AMD claims that the patch is not needed for Windows XP, but since AMD and Microsoft have both known about this bug since September of 2000, I'm willing to bet that bug-detecting code is already present in XP. As for why some with the deadly combination don't see lockups (and my post was merely to inform, not to make people defensive about their systems) I can only speculate that because the bug has to do with shared memory for AGP applications, it may only manifest itself on graphics-intensive programs, like 3d modelling or games. Since there aren't too many killer 3d games for Linux yet, my guess is that not many people will actually see the bug in normal use. Rich Cloutier President, C*O SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES www.sysupport.com ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
