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Date:      Fri, 31 Aug 2001 11:39:50 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Juha Saarinen <juha@saarinen.org>
Cc:        pahowes@fair-ware.com, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD and Athlon Processors
Message-ID:  <20010831113950.D57354@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <000101c131b9$0f97ec50$0a01a8c0@den2>; from juha@saarinen.org on Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 01:05:44PM %2B1200
References:  <ABENJKDFOLCKBPLGACFDAECODDAA.pahowes@fair-ware.com> <000101c131b9$0f97ec50$0a01a8c0@den2>

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Your MUA mangles quoted text.

On Friday, 31 August 2001 at 13:05:44 +1200, Juha Saarinen wrote:
>> On  Friday, 31 August 2001 12:35, Paul A. Howes wrote:
>>
>> In the past, I had heard that Linux and FreeBSD didn't work well
>> on the Athlon processors.  Have all of the issues since been
>> resolved?  Now that Tyan has the TigerMP motherboard out for
>> around $200, and the 1.2 GHz Athlon MP chips are around $160,
>> building a multiprocessor system is looking like a better and
>> better idea.  However, I wanted to first make sure that there are
>> no problems that I should be aware of.
>
> It's probably not the Athlon CPU that's the issue for either FreeBSD
> or Linux, but the motherboard chip sets. From personal experience,
> the first Linux 2.4 kernels weren't very happy with VIA chip sets,
> which are commonly used for Athlon boards. It's mainly IDE issues
> (e.g.  UDMA-66/100 support).
>
> Can't recall anything similar for FreeBSD, however.

There is an outstanding issue with "microtime went backwards".  While
it's not specific to AMD processors, it happens there more often.  I
also suspect that this is more likely to be a motherboard issue
(possibly BIOS) than the processor itself.  The answer seems to be to
disable APM.

Apart from that, I can only confirm other reports.  I'm running 4 AMD
processors on my most-used machines, and I don't have any problems.

Greg
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