Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 31 Aug 2001 08:25:25 -0500
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
To:        "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, juha@saarinen.org, pahowes@fair-ware.com
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD and Athlon Processors
Message-ID:  <20010831082525.A78918@grumpy.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <200108310801.f7V81EQ453022@saturn.cs.uml.edu>; from acahalan@cs.uml.edu on Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 04:01:14AM -0400
References:  <200108310801.f7V81EQ453022@saturn.cs.uml.edu>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 04:01:14AM -0400, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> 
> Juha Saarinen writes:
> 
> > 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).
> 
> There are at least two major problems with VIA chips:
> 
> Any fast PCI device (often IDE) can cause data corruption.

That might explain the problem I had with an Athlon 800 on Asus A7V.
System would not run thru a complete "make buildworld" without core dump
or kernel panic (think it was core dump). So I went BIOS-diving and
reading the manual carefully about the fine details of each configurable
parameter. Found one that defaulted off for Duron but on for Athlon
where the description mentioned "off" disabled PCI 2.2 enhancements.
"Off" cured my problems and the machine has been rock solid since
December when it was built.

Maybe that parameter or another mentioned "overlapping data transfer" as
well.

Have always attributed the problem to my old PCI cards.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20010831082525.A78918>