From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Aug 30 22:30:41 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 409A937B405 for ; Thu, 30 Aug 2001 22:30:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 84D966ACF2; Fri, 31 Aug 2001 11:39:50 +0930 (CST) Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 11:39:50 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Juha Saarinen Cc: pahowes@fair-ware.com, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD and Athlon Processors Message-ID: <20010831113950.D57354@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <000101c131b9$0f97ec50$0a01a8c0@den2> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <000101c131b9$0f97ec50$0a01a8c0@den2>; from juha@saarinen.org on Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 01:05:44PM +1200 Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] 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 -- When replying to this message, please take care not to mutilate the original text. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/email.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message