Oopses under 2.4.4pre8 with Tbird 1.2GHz/Epox 8kta3

I believe I've narrowed down the cause of my oopses/panics:

If I build with CONFIG_MK7 but comment out

define_bool CONFIG_X86_USE_3DNOW y

in the MK7 part of arch/i386/config.in, the 2.4.4 kernel appears to run perfectly.

On a side note, if I leave arch/i386/config.h untouched but force the use of the generic MMX implementations of fast_clear_page() and fast_copy_page() in arch/i386/lib/mmx.c, then I get some odd behavior but nothing as bad as I had been getting before. (For example, running awk always produces the message "awk: cmd. line: 1: (FILENAME- FNR=1) fatal:
attempt to access field -2147483648".)

Could this be a sign of a faulty 3DNOW! core in my CPU? If so, do you know of any utilities I could run that test these instructions? (For Linux or Windows.)

The CPU is a 1.2GHz Athlon Thunderbird with a 266MHz frontside bus. In case it's helpful, I've attached the contents of /proc/cpuinfo.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!

processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 4
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1202.774
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 : 2398.61

This problem is only seen on VIA chipsets so far. Never on AMD ones. This leads me to the current tentative diagnosis of 'VIA chipset bug'

Thanks, at least that clears up some of the mystery. Do you foresee any problems with running on this setup using a kernel compiled for Athlon but with the 3DNOW line commented out in arch/i386/config.in? Should I go one step further and force the use of generic mmx code in mmx.c? (I suppose I could just build for P2 or P3 to get the same effect.)

Thanks!

The VIA PCI bugs should be properly worked around in 2.4.3+ so it should be ok