The reason for the "mem=nopentium" in the lilo is that when the kernal was developed there are memory commands/coding that refer to pentium only commands. If you are running a Athlon/duron which do not have these commands they cause flaky/erratic behaviour. Roly
On Sun, 22 Sep 2002 09:37:15 -0500 Tom Brinkman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sunday September 22 2002 05:16 am, Anne Wilson wrote: > > On Thursday 19 Sep 2002 8:56 pm, you wrote: > > > On Thu, 19 Sep 2002 09:46:37 -0500 > > > > > > Marcia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. > > > > > > lilo append mem=nopentium > > > > Charles, could you tell me more about this? Is this something that > > all of us using Athlons/Durons should be using? Obviously this is > > there to avoid specific problems, what are they? > > Altho all chipsets and processors have bugs (errata), any > manufacturer, AMD, Intel, Cyrix, SiS, VIA, etc., the best way to avoid > Athlon or Duron problems is to _only_ use motherboards and power > supplies that are recommended by AMD > http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_869_4348,00.html > > That link is for XP's, but there's similar links for Tbirds and > Durons. I suspect Marcia's problem probly starts with the PSU and/or > motherboard. Ram quality is another likely culprit. Ram performance > and reliability is greatly affected by the quality of the mobo and PSU > tho. So even very good ram mght have problems on a marginal mobo/PSU. > 'Course overheating is always a suspect. > > FWIW, I've had a 1.4 Tbird oc'd to 1.55 with an AMD approved mobo > and PSU for over a year an a half. Never used the nopentium option, > never had any problems. GeF2 w/64mb's usin the open source XFree86 > driver. The nopentium parameter is to limit the page size requests > from system ram for the AGP card. If the video card has 16mb ram or > more onboard, the system ram probly will never, or rarely be used > anyhow. If system ram is being used by the Vcard, and causing > problems, one quick and dirty way fix is to set the AGP aperature in > bios to 4mb. Drawback is that it effectively disables AGP sidebanding > and will somewhat decrease 3d/accel performance. > > For more on the AMD/AGP issue see, > http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/35/175/7626960/ > Note: "There *is* an Athlon/AGP issue. This issue has > *not* been tied to a bug with the Athlon/Duron processors." > ...and... > "Our conclusion is that the operating system is creating coherency > problems within the system by creating cacheable translation to AGP > GART-mapped physical memory." > > IMO, another suspect is closed source proprietary drivers. As I > said, even on a highly oc'd, hot system, I've not had any problems > without nopentium usin the openXFree86-4.2.1 source driver which > BTW, now provides some 3d/accel support for nvidia cards. > XFree86-4.2.1 included with Mdk 9.0. > -- > Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas > > -- "The directions said to install Windows 98/2000 or better! So I installed Linux!" Linux Counter: 241069
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