I've just replace my Pentium-III system with an Athlon-based one, I rebuilt
the kernel with 'processor Family' changed from 'Pentium III' to Athlon/Duron/K7, and it failed to boot - it goes as far as "OK, booting the kernel" and hangs.
I can boot a kernel supposedly built for Pentium-III without any apparent problems.
My system is a 1.4GHz Athlon, 512MB 2100DDR memory, ASUS A7A266 system board (ALI M1647 chipset).
I've tried kernel versions 2.4.9, 2.4.11 (briefly), and 2.4.12, all with the same effect.
I've tried gcc-3.0.1 and gcc-2.96-81 (from RedHat 7.1), both have the same effect.
I've upgraded the BIOS from Rev 1006 to 1007 (the most recent), this makes no difference.
I've seen some discussion on here about a patch for Athlon motherboards, this doesn't appear to be relevant since it seems to be for a different chipset to mine.
/proc/cpuinfo reports:
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 4
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
stepping : 4
cpu MHz : 1410.328
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr
pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 2811.49
1) Am I doing anything stupid here?
2) Are there any issues with running a kernel configured for a Pentium III on an Athlon? It seems stable so far.
--
Steve Bennett
[email protected] wrote:
>
> I've just replace my Pentium-III system with an Athlon-based one, I rebuilt
> the kernel with 'processor Family' changed from 'Pentium III' to Athlon/Duron/K7, and it failed to boot - it goes as far as "OK, booting the kernel" and hangs.
>
> I can boot a kernel supposedly built for Pentium-III without any apparent problems.
Check the archives. Apparently there is an issue with the highly optimized
Athlon specific memory access/clearing routines that leads to instability on
some motherboards/BIOS revisions.
There is a fix available that seems to clear this up, but it hasn't made it into
the mainstream kernel yet.
The only real difference between Athlon and PIII kernels are some
Athlon-specific optimized assembly-code. The PIII versions still run, just not
quite as fast.
Chris
--
Chris Friesen | MailStop: 043/33/F10
Nortel Networks | work: (613) 765-0557
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