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Date:      Sat, 29 Dec 2001 10:53:40 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Glenn Johnson <glennpj@charter.net>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Does FreeBSD have a problem with some AMD processors?
Message-ID:  <20011229105340.K48518@monorchid.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <20011228204612.GA1226@gforce.johnson.home>
References:  <20011228181009.F95692@monorchid.lemis.com> <20011228204612.GA1226@gforce.johnson.home>

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On Friday, 28 December 2001 at 14:46:12 -0600, Glenn Johnson wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 06:10:09PM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
>
>> I've been using AMD processors almost exclusively in my main work
>> machines for over 4 years, and I've been very happy with them.  I'm
>> currently running a K6/233, a K6/333, an Athlon 750, a Duron 850 and
>> an Athlon XP 1700.  Last August, though, I bought a machine which gave
>> me a lot of trouble, the Duron 850 mentioned above.  I found that it
>> would freeze for no apparent reason.  I established that it wasn't the
>> memory by taking the memory of another machine and running it like
>> that; it made no difference.  I ended up also changing the motherboard
>> and the processor, but the hangs continued.  I could expect a hang
>> within 8 hours when doing 'make release'
>>
>> Just for the fun of it, I tried running Linux on it.  I've been
>> running a kernel build and 'make clean' on it now for 36 hours, and
>> it's still running fine.  Yesterday some Linux friends of mine came
>> around and looked at it and told me that the Linux kernel I was
>> running on the machine (2.4.16) had had a number of AMD-specific
>> fixes put in.  He didn't go into more detail, unfortunately, but I'll
>> ask him again when I have time: it could be something relating to
>> chipset bugs we have seen and fixed.  It would help to know, though,
>> if other people are experiencing similar problems.  Please let me
>> know if you're having problems with AMD processors which seem to be
>> specific to FreeBSD, especially if they're hangs (i.e. the machine
>> stops reacting, but the display still shows the last state, it doesn't
>> reboot or panic).
>
> I have had this exact problem.  I have an Epox 8KTA board with a
> 1GHz Athlon (Thunderbird) with 256MB of PC-133 memory.  I would
> consistently get random errors, usually during a compilation, using
> the default BIOS settings.  After fiddling with some of the BIOS
> options, such as enabling PCI burst, the system runs pretty stable.
> However, occasionally I will get that freeze that you refer to during a
> buildworld.  As far as I can tell though if I set the memory clock to
> 100MHz the problem goes away completely, or at least I have not observed
> it happen yet.

This is a Duron, so it has a 100 MHz memory clock anyway.

Greg
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