Athlon Motherboards And Chipsets Under Linux 156
appletnc from linhardware.com points us to their article about Athlons and Linux. They're trying to sort out the compatibility problems rumored to exist with the boards and chipsets. He says "Despite SuSE's
Athlon workaround and
RedHat's (in)compatibility
note, etc.) and rumors, we have not seen many reports of problems by LhD users. Are Linux users actually experiencing problems with Athlon motherboards? Given that the outstanding price/performance value of the Athlon, the question is how well do Athlon motherboards work under Linux?"
Check your ram (Score:3)
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Re:Memory? (Score:1)
I still feel more confident with a good ole intel BX. I've never had a problem with them and they have great support.
Ask Alan Cox (Score:1)
Where do these rumors get started? Probably from people that have been computer 'experts' since way back in the win95 days.
Onboard K7M soundcard (Score:1)
Don't Know About Athlon, but ... (Score:1)
Re:no problems here (Score:1)
No Sound (Was: fine on the left coast) (Score:1)
Re:Check your ram (Score:1)
Nick
Asus k7v...not Asus's best... (Score:1)
If you have a K7V or are thinking of getting one, bookmark this web site [k7v.com].
I'm generally disapointed with the K7V. It is a new board, only released for a couple months, so bugs should be expected...yet, I was hoping for better. I have a couple other PII Asus boards, and was so happy with them that I took a chance on the Athlon boards.
Here's a sample of the bugs I've encountered: The system will sometimes boot into a BIOS "safe mode" ... and will change all the settings back to the defaults. The system will hang solid, and I can't determine the reason why. Looks and smells like a hardware defect...but I can't tell. Note, I am _not_ overclocking this system, though I was planning on it after the system became reliable. It isn't yet!
On a good note, Asus has attempted to fix the problems it suffers from with frequent BIOS upgrades. Unfortunately, some of the problems are just silly. For example, for a few BIOS revisions you could *not* use a PCI video card...only AGP. The latest BIOS -- 1006 -- fixes a variety of problems like this one, and I expect that most issues will be resolved within a few months.
Some of the problems might be fixed with the 1006 revision...though I'm lothe to upgrade because of some of the problems I've had to work around with other BIOS upgrades.
The built-in sound card might be supported with the latest linux development kernel (2.4pre), and patches are available on some web sites. Search the web site mentioned earlier [k7v.com] for details.
Hear, Hear! (Score:1)
Here's my horror story...
For those who are interested in my system specs:
Athlon 500 Processor
Gigabyte GA-7IX mainboard
128M PC100 Ram (single DIMM)
ATI All-in-Wonder 128 AGP
2 9.1 GB SCSI HDs
LS120 IDE drive
SB Live! Value PCI
Linksys 10/100 Eathernet NIC PCI
Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI PCI
USR 56K Voice Faxmodem Pro Ext.
Pioner 6X/32X SCSI DVD-ROM
OS is Mandrake Linux 7.0-2
Long story short...
First mainboard turned out to be DOA out of the box. Second mainboard appeared to be OK, but, after a couple of weeks in operation, the system started crashing...
Here's how bad it was; the crashes were the nasty ones where the system would completely lock-up, and could only be recovered by the L Alt-SysRq song-and-dance [mandrakeuser.org]. Unfourtunitly, it doesn't always work...
Sometimes the crashes were random, but some of the crashes occoured after certian events (ex. loading a >1MB file to/from the LS120 drive, heavy disk/IO activaty under certian conditions). It even crashed, with a kernel panic, durning an fsck! Meraculessly, the system survived, I was able to repair it, and it's still working (for better or worse), I,m typing this post on it right now. And the crashes left no clues in the system logs (you know that you have a defianate hardware problem if that happens).
Hardware problems are the most diffacult to diagnose, especialy if you don't have hardware testing equiptment, and I know that through painful experance.
I latter determined that the problem was the mainboard, or, more spificly, the mainboard IO bridge. I didn't think it was phyicaly possable, but this sucks, blows, and bites all at the same time.
Rigth now I,m waiting until the replacement MB gets here. Believe me, it's not going to be gigabyte, two bad MBs in a row doesn't inspire confidince in the manufacture's quality control.
Anybody have any thoughts on Tyan's Athlon MB [tyan.com]? I decieded to go with that MB because of thier reputation, and it doesn't have these awfull windows-only fetures (ex. AMR slot).
Do they have the M$ flags too ? (Score:1)
And do they still state on their web site that they 'dedicate ourselves in making CPU for the Micro$oft Window$ Operating System$' ?
Understand who wants. >:)
"People are not schizophrenic usualy: They tend to be white inside AND outside, OR, black inside AND outside"
Shuttle AI61 (Score:1)
I love my Athlon! (Score:1)
I've also swapped out some hardware: TNT2-M64 video card, ATI Rage 128 Pro video card, ne2000 compatible 10 Mbps card, and a linksys 10/100 ethernet adapter.
I love the MSI motherboard. It has the ability to boot whatever drive I want in any order, which allows me to install Lilo and MS-DOS menu boot sectors on 2 harddrives to preserve at least 2 separate Win 98 installations and boot various linux kernels without openning the case.
I have no complaints and never really had any problems besides the lack of 3D support for both the TNT2 and ATI video cards, and absence of the linksys driver in the linux kernel (but that was easy to compile).
well... (Score:1)
Athlon and SD 11 problems (Score:1)
ASUS K7V -- Linux Tested & Certified (Score:5)
An interesting note about this board is that on the box, listed among its various features is a Linux 'icon', with a checkmark and the text "linux-tested.com". Apparantly this is some sort of certification for Linux hardware.
I was curious about this, so I went to linux-tested.com and read up. Asus actually paid these guys money to put this board through various Linux tests (both distro and non-distro specific), and it passed everything. This is a really nice thing for Asus to do, and I thank them for it.
k7m cache performance (Score:1)
It Kinda Depends (Score:1)
Red Hat 6.x always worked fine, Mandrake 7.x will also work, as does Slackware 7.0 -- I guess the main point is that as long as you're using something recent, everything should be fine.
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Re:Mine is good (Score:1)
Okay, where can I get this updated version? At least I know why I could never get agpgart to work on my system...
Perf problems may be kernel issue, !KDE, !Athlon (Score:2)
Your problems are likely not Athlon or KDE related.
It may instead have to do with what kernel you're running. Apparently, the later 2.3.XX kernels have VM performance issues, and Alan Cox's Diary [linux.org.uk] hints that 2.2.15 also may have some issues. (I'd give an exact entry date, except that I can't seem to get to the site right now. It was sometime in the last week or two.) I looked at the SuSE USA [suse.com] website, and noticed that SuSE 6.4 comes with Kernel 2.2.14. I'm not sure if it has the same VM issues that Alan was referring to wrt. 2.2.15.
Interestingly, from what I remember reading in the Linux Kernel mailing list archives, the problems are worse on large-memory machines.
--JoePS. Why is it that nobody seems to be able to spell A T H L O N correctly?
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Re:suse 6.4 sucks (Score:1)
AMD == Window$ lover (Score:1)
"AMD provides Windows compatible processors".
So AMD is saying not willing to embrace Linux.
So why bothering with M$-designed CPUs ?
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Dual Mobos? (Score:1)
FIC SD-11 r1.8 + RedHat 6.2 = No Problemo! (Score:1)
The FIC board has been great. Erm, more specifically... the r1.8 FIC board has been great. Previous revisions were fraught with problems,
When FIC fixed 'em in r1.8, tho, it was unfortunately too late to reverse the damage done to their reputation in the public's eye.
But if you're looking for a good, cheap (got mine put together for under $500) Athlon system, the FIC won't disappoint. Provided you get r1.8.
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Athlon 600 on a FIC SD-11 (Score:1)
Once JBuilder 3.5 came out I wiped nt and installed RedHat 6.2. I had zero problems with the install. And in normal usage it's fine.
But I can make it kernel panic by opening 8 SetiAtHome sessions and every large app I have on the machine. I'm not sure if this is due to flakey memory/motherboard or some kernel issue. I still need to make the newest kernel and update the bios. But not in that order.
FWIW
minniger
Re:SuSE only! (Score:1)
Athlon = K7
Actually it's quite stupid on the part of RedHat to list AMD K7 in Tier 2 hardware, but ALL
K7-based mobos in Unsupported!
Re:K6 can't do SMP, Athlon can (Score:1)
According to Ace's hardware, AMD has announced the 760 chipset. A variant soon to follow, the 760MP, will have SMP support. All the AMD reps will say is that these chipsets are due in the second half of this year (thanks for narrowing it down). Tyan supposedly has a motherboard planned to be released before the new year that will have dual Athlon support. Head over to Ace's Hardware [aceshardware.com] and search for "760MP".
My only issue is that this will allow two processors. We just got a server here at work with quad Pentium III Xeon 550MHz. Wow. I want that for my Athlon system.
Red Hat? Well, *fancy that*... (Score:1)
Not that I imagine for a moment that there haven't been problems with Athlon motherboards and systems. But there's no mention of "i820", "Cape Cod", "MTH" or "Rambus" anywhere, even though the Compatibility List as a whole was updated just last Friday [redhat.com]. Moreover, the "Tier 1", "Tier 2" business is straight out of Intel's and Microsoft's playbooks for the power games they play with their resellers, big customers, "partners" and the like. (Remember the story of Microsoft's "Tier 1 OEMs" and the Windows 95 desktop from the trial?) Funny to see it turning up in a Linux distribution's HCL...
In this light, passages like "Non-Intel clone CPUs. These CPUs may not be any more "buggy" than pure Intel CPUs, but since the market size of these chips is smaller, what problems do occur seem to be harder to get around." look like subtle but classic IBM-school FUD [tuxedo.org]. Paranoia is not my drug, and Red Hat is not my Great Satan, but I think I smell something fishy here.
Mine is good (Score:2)
Athlon/Linux (Score:1)
AMD K7 (Score:2)
Gigabyte 7IX /w Athlon 550 (Score:1)
Athlon & Linux (Score:1)
I have been using an Athlon-based server for a fairly critical server for awhile now, and there have been no bumps in the road. Perhaps the users experiencing problems are actually having hardware problems with a bad batch of motherboard chipsets or improper Athlon cooling. I have noticed that some third party coolers for the Athlon look flimsy and extremely cheap.
no problems here (Score:3)
I have set up a couple machines with Mandrake 7 (sweet install, BTW) with no issues at all. Athlon 700 and 550's, Microstar 6167 and Abit KA7 (rockin boards in their respective generations)and have sen no problems.
A friend with the Microstar and a 750 Athlon also seems to be cruising fine. Not sure whast the fuss is about...
Problems? Never. (Score:1)
Re:Check your ram (Score:1)
specifically put the APPEND="mem=256m" in lilo.conf
HOLY SHIT!!!!!
Ok sorry about that, I just got a free memory upgrade from 64M to 256M. Thank you so much - I never knew that. I never had a machine where it was an issue until this one.
Also thanks to other info on this page I now don't seem to get crashes from my Asus K7M + Athlon 750 + GeForce DDR (previously just running xlock -mode random for a while could do it). Thanks again.
Chris Morgan
I/O Sluggishness (was: 2 cents..) (Score:1)
This week, Matthew Vanecek complained that although plenty of folks were talking about how 'kswapd' was broken, he couldn't find any patches to fix it. He asked if a fix was available, and Rik van Riel replied, "People on the linux-mm mailing list are fixing things as we speak... http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/"
Elsewhere, under the Subject: PATCH: Possible solution to VM problems, Juan J. Quintela posted a few iterations of a patch to improve the poor performance of recent development kernels, in particular the problem with 'kswapd' using up 100% of the CPU.
I think there is a patch out now for this "X is sluggish / Disk Activity" thing going around.
Alls fine on the left coast (Score:1)
Sure, I've had some problems with GL apps crashing XF4 but I blame X and nvidia for that.
Experiences (Score:1)
Overall, I don't love the KA7 like most people. Check out my review [pcscoop.com] for more information.
Also, the BeOS would install, but not run on the system.
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
Article sounds like something Microsoft might say! (Score:1)
"...the question is how well do Athlon motherboards work under Linux?"
So, you're basically comparing how well a motherboard/cpu has been designed for a certain operating system??? That's like all those dodgy stickers on the front of machines saying "Designed for Windows NT" etc.
What next? Boxes with "Designed for RedHat Linux" on them? Instead, why not have "Designed really well, all you OS coders should now get to work taking advantage of this great motherboard/cpu!".
Motherboards/cpus should not be designed for an operating system. They should be designed to be the best it can be (obviously part of that is being compatible with existing hardware etc), but the overriding concern when designing hardware shouldn't be how well it works for software. Software can be changed comparitively easily, hardware design is a lot more expensive.
Slack 7.0 Works (Score:1)
APPEND="MEM=160M"
in lilo.conf. I haven't done much heavy lifting with the box yet, but it seems problem-free so far.
Re:Well... (Score:1)
It just worked for me on my Athlon 500 with a K7M.
Re:FIC motherboard and 700Mhz RH 6.2 No problems (Score:1)
I'm fixing to order a 1ghz Athlon on a FIC SD11 Motherboard with 384 of Ram (Booyaa), anyone heard of any problems with this setup (mobo or chip) on redhat 6.2(without any patches or upgrades)?
Thanks for your help
Re:Not a problem, sorta (Score:1)
If you get one of those neat racks that mount in one of your 5.25 bays this is a snap!
I have an issue... (Score:2)
But I don't know if it's athalon related or not, might be the video card... But I'm getting crappy performance under X... We're talking I click to close a window, and the mouse freezes for a few seconds , then is sluggish, then the window closes and everthing is okay. Launching an app also grinds the system to a crawl. Same behaviour with various window managers, although some seem better than others. The system is a Athalon 850 with 256 megs RAM, a Matrox G400 w/32 megs of RAM, Asus VX133 motherboard, and a Maxtor 7200 RPM UltraDMA-66 drive. If anyone has any idea what might be causing this slowness or how I can track it down to a specific component, please share!
I have no end of problems (Score:1)
I kept getting all these NO SPACE LEFT ON DEVICE messages. It must be a defective motherboard
A friend suggested that I try typing rm -rf / to solve the problem but then nothing would work
I am never buying another APOGEE motherboard as long as I live and I don't care what their lawyers do to me for saying so.
2 cents.. (Score:4)
There were some issues:
1) The VIA ATA/66 chipset on board + linux didn't like my Maxtor 30GB HD using DMA when my CD-RW drive was running, and would cause hard locks. I replaced it with a Seagate ATA/66 IDE drive, and all is well.
2) The Irongate AGP is only recently well supported for DRI, and probably still needs some polish.
3) The interactivity does get somewhat sluggish with XFree 4.0 when there is a lot of hard drive activity.
4) The interactivity under X was extremely slow until I turned on UDMA on the hard drive using hdparm.
That all said, the system is quite fast and extremely stable, once I got the HD situation figured out.
I think that the IDE support needs some work for VIA Athlon chipsets (which is an experimental patch for the kernel, BTW), but other than that, no problems.
jf
No problems here (Score:1)
I'm typing this sitting in front of an athlon 550 with FIC SD11 motherboard. It's been working great with both redhat 5.2 (plus security patches, including an updated Xfree86 3.x) and redhat 6.2 (plus security patches, not including an updated XFree). I had to fiddle a bit to get X running on 5.2, but 6.2 worked right out of the box.
The video card is an AGP Matrox Millenium G400.
I haven't tried 3d on it at all.
I got it from LinuxIt! computers in San Diego.
On the other hand, the celeron system next to me that we built from scratch has been having problems, one of which is preventing me from using it for its primary purpose.
My K6/2 at home crashes infrequently (or at least it did running 6.1; it hasn't crashed since I upgraded to 6.2, but it was such an infrequent crash that it could still be waiting to surprise me
So in my experience, of the x86 compatible machines I'm currently closest to, the athlon has been the most reliable.
Re:I have an issue... (Score:1)
OUTSTANDING PRICE/PERFORMANCE?? (Score:1)
Re:2 cents.. (Score:1)
With 8 128MB ECC DIMMs, the systems only recognized one trio as the full 384MB. All other combinations gave us either 128 or 256. Any pair would give us the full 256 and the Intel boards recognized any trio as 384.
The one using IDE also had a hard lockup. Not even the power switch worked -- had to pull the plug.
K6/233 on Intel worked like a charm, so I don't blame AMD. Now that AMD makes a chip set, I may give them another chance.
Asus K7M WORKS (Score:2)
MSI-6195 + Athlon 800 = setiathome lockups (Score:1)
I've had problems with the dynamically linked setiathome 2.4 binary. It seemed to cause random hard lockups. I didn't see any sign of trouble in the logfiles.
The problems with setiathome disappeared when I switched to a statically linked version.
BTW, I'm running Slackware 7, upgraded to a 2.2.15 kernel. It has glibc-2.1.2.
What I can't understand is how this could happen. It seems to me that something must have gone wrong while the program was in kernel-mode. But what?
Also the X-server from NVidia for my TNT2 card caused intermittant lockups. I haven't tried XFree86 4.0 yet.
Mtrr issues (Score:1)
I'm using an Asus K7M w/ a 600 MHz Athlon.
Re:FIC motherboard and 700Mhz RH 6.2 No problems (Score:1)
I'm not sure about RH4.2, but I can verify that Mandrake 7.x works quite well. If there were any problems, it would be due to the Athlon MTRR code, which as I recall, caused the kernel not to boot on 2.2.12 and earlier.
Re:no problems here (Score:1)
Am i wrong ?
Re:ASUS K7V -- Linux Tested & Certified (Score:2)
I recently built a server on a K7V, 650MHz K7, and 128MB PC133 memory (+7200rpm drives). It's seriously fast and has been totally stable so far.
I suspect that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. There were a couple of issues with MTRR support and AGP support, but nothing major. It's somewhat likely that some people have had the usual issues with faulty hardware and have blamed it on the new K7 processor and motherboard support. There have certainly been enough "problems with the kernel" reported on linux-kernel that have turned out to be bad hardware.
Tim
Re:Magic smoke! (Score:1)
Magic smoke! (Score:1)
Rock solid but lacking ATA66 (Score:1)
128MB 6ns 2-2-2 PC100 RAM
Mind to get high quality RAM modules if youre using AMD chipsetted mobos. They really depend on it. Though Linux ran much more stable then Windoze with generic PC133 modules. But I changed back to a PC100 branded one. Runs rock solid and takes full advantage of the SuperBypass mode (AMD chipset specific feature).
Still it short of ATA66 support under SuSE6.3 which Im still using. Not much performance for the harddrive.
Apart from that its screaming.
If youre having problems check the athlon newsgroup... Most comprehensive information on anything from K6-2 to Athlons
Dsyncd
Incompatibility? (Score:1)
Re:Athelon works, I think... (Score:1)
I've always found GNOME to be the slow one... I've run both and KDE is the smaller one, and with Linux's agressive disk caching it runs a lot faster then Windows for what I do. (software development (meaning lots of terminal windows open) and Netscape)
XWindows does use a client/server model. That's why in general graphics performence is worse then the more low-level (but not client/server capable) model of Windows. This lets you remotely run apps, but it also slows graphics performence. I've not found it to be much of a problem but then again I don't use any games.
IIRC shared memory is not used for communication, UNIX sockets are.
Re:Yeah I have a problem (Score:1)
Problems? Where? (Score:1)
Only issue I had with this config. is the trouble I had getting UDMA to work - I had to work in a 2.3.99-pre kernel; of course, UDMA is always a pain to get working... now if I didn't use a wrong hdparm -X and screw up the partition it'd work even better
ASUS K7M + Athlon (Score:1)
Athlon 750 on an ABIT KA7 mobo: (Score:2)
My uptime so far:
6:06pm up 21 days, 25 min, 11 users, load average: 0.06, 0.05, 0.01
I (and a bunch of hardware sites) highly recommend this board, especially if you don't want that STUPID, WORTHLESS "AMR" slot and built-in AC97 ("what's a s/n ratio?") audio.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Re:k7m cache performance (Score:1)
If you have a K7M motherboard make sure you update your BIOS to version 1009 or later.
Can this be done from Linux?
Re:Mine is good (Score:1)
Anyway with XF86 4, Xinerama now, life is good. So, when's all that legendary wonderful 3D stuff from Precision Insight going to come out for XF86 4? Will it be another couple years of "when it comes out it will be oh so wonderful" like we had with XF86 4? Did XF86 3.x have something akin to Xinerama, or just a separate display for the other card and monitor?
Root cause (Score:1)
Although I do not always agree with governments or organizations taking control over "mundane aspects", I feel that the need for standardization and improved quality in both hardware and software are in order:
Why does Microsoft Windows take "forever" to boot up? It has to check a huge database of possible devices that may have been added to your system while it was powered down. It is no longer just a "device probe" to the various ports common equipment is found on; it is a comprehensive check of mapped I/O memory, devices that may be on the parallel port, and responses to "poking" certain registers, etc.
If a committee or group were to decide on (a) an extendable hardware implementation that could last a good number of years, and (b) independent certification and quality review of source code; we would all benefit. Examples?
Today's software has it's own problems: Application developer's "take advantage" of increased CPU "horsepower" by using lax coding methods. The e-mail application I use it work (Banyan's Beyond Mail 3.n release) uses a bubble sort (or equivalent performance) algorhythm, and yet qsort() is part of the ANSI C specification! I've seen repetitive sequential searches done on databases exceeding 100K records. And let's not forget the quality assurance issues that plague us so. I.E., if it's barely scaleable and only annoyingly slow and buggy, it's OK to release to the public so they can alpha-test for us!
It's definitely time to move forward to a new and more rigid standard to protect both individuals and business. Will it be expensive in the transition? Yes. The current popular PC architecture will have to be replaced. After the initial investment, however, we should be able to rest easy. It would be good, once again, to have faith in commercial software. And, also to have security in knowing that the hardware industry will not leave us "in the dust" with a useless, proprietary technology that is taking up space in the attic or closet.
Re:2 cents.. (Score:2)
>K6-2/3 range, I'm a little gun shy of VIA and
>FIC.
That's funny. My 503+ FIC mobo was a WONDERFUL board that I never had a problem with. I put three different processors in it, from a K6-233 to a K6-2 300 to a K6-3 400 and never had a problem with the board. The only downside that I found with the Via chipsets were that their PCI DMA controlers weren't as good as Intel's, and some PCI cards like sound cards and capture cards would drop data.
> The one using IDE also had a hard lockup. Not
> even the power switch worked -- had to pull the
> plug.
I did have problems with some UDMA/33 devices locking on the VIA K6 chipsets. But that was primarily a cheap cdrom that didn't do UDMA very well.
The VIA K133 chipset motherboards are supposed to run very well.
jf
Re:Get a compliant power supply (Score:2)
jf
agpgart's been non-functional (Score:2)
Athlon 700 and K7V (Score:1)
I highly recommend it.
Give the sound card its own IRQ? (Score:2)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Athlon 700 with BioStar Motherboard and Mandrake 7 (Score:2)
The only issue I came across is the memory chips which can be an issue with certain motherboards depending on the quality of the memory and who made them. I used to have PC100 cheap ram stick and frankly, it causes the machine to locks up once a while. So I upgraded it to PC133 Micron memory chip and violia.... it works like charm and never had a lockup for past 4 months since I had it running without any shutdown.
One advice, be sure to check on the quality of the power supply and the memory chip since they can be real picky on those. BTW...did I mention that I have 512Meg of RAM here?
Cannot wait for another development machine from my client which will be even more fun...which I specified 1Gig Athlon, Asus Motherboard and 512Meg of Ram...with probably Matrox G400 unless Matrox come out with something newer. Not exactly partial to GeoForce Chips til they get the drivers GPLed for X Servers.
Anyone got any advice on where to purchase the Alpha Motherboards and Processors directly instead of getting pre-built machines? Wanna to get those.
Re:Athlon Problems Explained (Score:1)
I had purchased an Athlon 600 with a BCM/GVC motherboard (QS750) around the time the Athlons came out. I had a lot of problems for some time with programs crashing in Windows at random times. I installed Red Hat 6.0 at that time after I was unable to boot Mandrake Linux 6.0. AFAIK, the only difference between the kernels in the two distributions (in ver. 6 of each, at least) is that it is optimized for Pentium processors in Mandrake (along with all the other packages in Mandrake), but I could be wrong (did Mandrake 6 come out later with possibly a more recent kernel?). I had no problems running anything in Red Hat.
In December last year, BCM/GVC finally released a patch to their motherboard that was made to fix problems with Athlon 700's & 750's. Not stated on the site was that it also fixed many problems with running things with ALL processor speeds. Programs didn't crash anymore in Windows, so I decided to try installing Mandrake again. Sure enough, it booted and ran with no problems.
Other people may have had different results, but this is at least what happened for me...
Smokeless CPU? What is it? (Score:2)
Maybe Im being dumb, but what the HELL is the 'Smokeless CPU' mentioned as Tier 3 Incompatible and Unsupported CPU. Is this a gag, a real chip, or some bizarre reference to underclocking for heat-disspiation prevention?
And you can phone a friend...
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
Re:Alls fine on the left coast (Score:2)
Re:Athelon works, I think... (Score:3)
[I can only verify that this works on an Asus K7M and may not even work for your Asus K7M. Do not do this if you feel litigious or are just plain retarded. You have been warned.]
Go into the BIOS setup area. Then go to Advanced. Arrow down to Internal cache. It might say write-thru or enabled or something. Hit F5. A little box will come up saying "Load Optimal Settings." Hit Enter. It should now say "Reserved." At this point, you need to go back into your other settings and configure things back the way you wanted them.
As an aside, you have to go through this whole rigamarole EVERY TIME you enter the BIOS. Yay Asus.
As another aside, a friend of mine discovered this while I was visiting him and other friends for a Local Area Network Object. This was a several-hundred-mile trip and involved the purchase of a moose. 3=) 3=) 3=).
My K7/600 and SD-11 work fine under RH 6.2 (Score:2)
Anyway, Linux runs like a champ on my Athlon. I hate it when I have to boot back into Windows just to play Tribes. I did have to add a mem line to lilo.conf (all 128MB wasn't being detected) but that was the only oddity. Whether that was because of chipset issues or not I never found out. I meant to look into it, but haven't had the time.
Oh yeah, one more thing: I've got SCSI everything in that box (Apaptec 2940U2W, Quantum Atlas 10K, Plextor CD and CD-R in case you were curious; they all work great). If I remember correctly, the chipset problems happened a lot with newer IDE controllers. Maybe I skirted the problem with SCSI, I don't know.
-B
Re:Mine is good (Score:2)
*looks for link*
ahh.. here [sourceforge.net] it is..
just copy and decode
it should make it into the 2.3.99-whateveritsatnow real soon now..
SD11 was source of some problem (Score:2)
1. The mtrr handling error was fixed by upgrading the kernel.
2. The system would spontaneously reboot every 20-40min, less if under load. I ended up swapping out the power supply, memory, and several cards before a FIC rep told me that there were power management problems on early revs of the SD11 (mine was "0253" -- 028x on were ok if memory serves me right). FIC tech support were up-front and professional, and issued an RMA directly, not thru the retailer. While the problem was irritating, the replacement quick. The system's been running flawlessly since then (7-8 months).
Similar problems under BeOS... (Score:2)
J.
Re:OSS obviously ain't too nimble (Score:2)
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Re:K6 can't do SMP, Athlon can (Score:4)
3. x86 architecture specific questions
1.Can I use my Cyrix/AMD/non-Intel CPU in SMP?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: Intel claims ownership to the APIC SMP scheme, and unless a company licenses it from Intel they may not use it. There are currently no companies that have done so. (This of course can change in the future) FYI - Both Cyrix and AMD support the non-proprietary OpenPIC SMP standard but currently there are no motherboards that use it.
Big Athlon Problems!!! (Score:3)
Yeah, I've had tons of problems with Athlons and the chipsets. I can't afford one!!! Anyyone, feel free to send one on over and I'll be glad to tell you if I find any incompadibilities.
Athelon works, I think... (Score:2)
I thought everything was ok, but I noticed that things are a bit sluggish when running KDE. I don't think I've ever noticed that when playing with KDE/Linux before--and on much slower machines. For instance, I was installing Star Office while playing an MP3, and not only was the installation dog slow, but the MP3 cut in and out as well. No offence, but I can do that and much more under Win2K on the same machine. I can even do it with Win98 SE. Something just isn't right.
I also notice that the mouse is sluggish when navigating through menus, especially if another program is running. Response is far from immediate when I click on icons to load programs, or browse files. I can't tell you what Internet browsing is like, since my external modem is still on order, and all I had to put in the box was an old ISA Plug 'n Pray modem.
All that to say, Linux seems tired and sluggish on an Athelon 600 with loads of RAM--and Win2K blazes on the same machine.
--SpookComix
Athlon Problems Explained (Score:5)
Second was the AGP problems. These are still getting worked out, but it looks like there are working drivers for certain kernel versions. I believe these are yet to be merged in the official kernels, but it can't be long now. This caused hangs when starting X Windows.
Both are solved. The first was a real problem. It caused the machine to not boot. The second was only a problem if you wanted really fast 3D speeds.
-Dave
K6 can't do SMP, Athlon can (Score:3)
Nope, sorry. The Athlon can do SMP (one of the benefits of a redesign -- and of using the EV6). The K6 cannot do SMP.
I've long looked at that pair of old K6-2/300 CPUs I have sitting left over and wished I could upgrade my MP3 server to an SMP box, but it's not to be. The K6-* chips can't handle SMP because of design limitations (and some patent hinkiness with Intel, if I recall correctly).
A better question is when will the Athlon do SMP? AMD would do well to court the Linux/smaller server crowd and hand us an SMP-able chipset that we can use. Since Intel seems to be having problems delivering just about everything they "release", one would think AMD would jump at the chance to steal some of the workgroup/small server market from them like they've done with the dektop. Guess they're just too busy. Darn shame, too. Best way to get me to buy another AMD chip isn't with a faster clock speed (600MHz is plenty fast, thanks), it's by tempting me with SMP. Hell, they release an SMP chipset, they'll sell me two chips at once! :-)
-B
Re:AGP problems (Score:4)
I have had RH 6.1 installed (since Feb) and I have not noticed anything. I have run XF86 3.3.5 and XF86 4.0 and only have seen one distoted artifact. It is a half inch strip of pixel coloration across the top of my screen, which probably is a result of the hardware nVidia driver for XF86. It goes away when the grey X background and mouse come onto the screen.
I _did_ have AGP problems when running Q3A. The problem occured after playing Q3A for a while. The game would freeze up and begin repeating sound. I would have to reboot by telneting in from another machine (killing q3a only made the sound stop playing)
Fortunately nVidia includes an option in XF86 4.0 that you can add to your XF86Config file to disable AGP:
(put into your "Screen" section. this is also described in nVidia's FAQ for XF86 v4 installation)
Option "NvAgp" "0"
This will disable AGP under X at least for nvidia video cards running under XF86 v4.0. I would be anxious to know if this option helps/heleped out with any other AGP errors that might be presenting themselves to others...
Example of mttr and agp on a Athlon. (Score:2)
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K L1 D Cache: 64K
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K
CPU: AMD-K7(tm) Processor stepping 02
Checking 386/387 coupling... OK, FPU using exception 16 error reporting.
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
mtrr: v1.36 (20000221) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Later on with AGP
installing Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 203M
agpgart: Detected AMD Irongate chipset
agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xe8000000
Both are definitly solved.
Athlon a problem? (Score:2)
Exception a) Red Hat 6.2 didn't autodetect the RAM size, although append="mem=256M" cleared that problem. Oddly though, while SETI had been running quite smoothly on the K6-3, it caused kernel panic in the K7. *shrug* too bad, it would have been fun to see how much time-per-unit changed.
-Mith
Re:Ask Alan Cox (Score:2)
lilo.conf Re:Check your ram (Score:3)
for best results, edit
if lilo chokes, on a listing for a floppy boot kernel for example, try mounting a floppy, then running lilo... if it still chokes, you might have to remove the listing for the floppy boot option. (you can still overide this at the boot prompt if needbe to boot from whatever device you want)
I had many an issue with this when I first started playing with linux - and everyplace I looked skipped over the fact that you need to run lilo after configuring lilo.conf
Doh!
Re:Athelon works, I think... (Score:2)
Both shared memory (aka mmap) and sockets are used for IPC. Other kinds of IPC include UNIX domain sockets (on the file system, I think), FIFOs and pipes, System V IPC, and even signals. If you can get a copy of W. Richard Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, he's got a chapter or two on IPC techniques, and he also wrote UNIX Network Programming, Volume 2: Interprocess Communications.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
Re:Works Great! (Score:2)
-l
only 1 small problem with my ABIT KA7 (Score:2)
The guys in the Abit news group suggested enabling the "memory hole" in bios. This solved the problem for Windows, but slowed some Linux stuff down and took made the networking not work.
I did some digging in the Kernel development group and it looks like some high level people are on top of the problem, though.
The real question... (Score:2)
For me, it's not the incompatibilities that matter. Heck, I run OpenBSD on a sparc, which is sure as hell incompatible with an Intel chip. And that's OK. I am, however, pissed that OpenBSD threads are *broken* on the sparc right now. But I can live with this, given the *BSD fixation with Intel. However, if this were an AMD chip, and I had to live with some piece of my OS not working on the Athlon because of their chipset, even though it is *supposedly* compatible with Intel, then I would be demanding a refund. Unless, of course, they provided the support necessary for fixing the problem.
Re:AGP problems (Score:2)
Re:Example of mttr and agp on a Athlon. (Score:2)
That was not the problem. As reported in MaximumPC and elsewhere, there was a hardware issue with GeForce, a 4X AGP card, and the IronGate chipset, which uses 2X AGP. The problem was solved by having the GeForce automatically step down to 1X rather than 2X, which was considered a problem by users. [maximumpc.com]
According to the Feb 2000 issue, pages 80 and 81, in "Ask The Doctor" it is reported that running at 2x was causing system hangs, so the drivers setp the card down.
The presumption is that later boards with the KX133 chipset do not exhibit these issues.