VIA Southbridge bug (Was: Crash on boot (2.4.5))
Quoted 16 lines · Rob Landley
Quoted 8 lines · Alan Cox
Quoted 5 lines
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possible on the memory bus. Several people have reported that machines that are otherwise stable on the bios fast options require the proper conservative settings to be stable with the Athlon optimisations
Do we need patch to memtest to use 3dnow?
Possibly yes. Although memtest86 really tries to test for onchip not bus related problems
What else tends to fail on the motherboard that might be easy to test for? Processor overheating? (When the thermometer circuitry's there, anyway.) Something to do with DMA? (Would DMA to/from a common card like VGA catch chipset-side DMA problems?) There was an SMP exception thing floating by recently, is that common and testable?
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I know there's a lot of funky peripheral combinations that behave strangely, but without opening that can of worms what kind of common problems on the motherboard itself might be easy to test for in a "run this overnight and see if it finds a problem with your hardware" sort of way?
Rob
(
P.S. What kind of CPU load is most likely to send a processor into overheat?
CPUburn from http://users.ev1.net/~redelm/
My Celeron 300 oc'ed to 450 run RC5 and Mersenne Prime for hours, but locked up after 5 minutes of CPU burn.
The best CPU ( and bus/memory) test program that exists, IMHO
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(Other than "a tight loop", thanks. I mean what kind of instructions?)
This is going to be CPU specific, isn't it? Our would a general instruction mix that doesn't call halt be enough? It would need to keep the FPU busy too, wouldn't it? And maybe handle interrupts. Hmmm...)I wonder... The torture test Tom's Hardware guide uses for processor overheating is GCC compiling the Linux kernel. (That's what caught the Pentium III 1.13 gigahertz instability when nothing else would.) I wonder, maybe if a stripped down subset of a known version of GCC and a known version of the kernel were running from a ramdisk... It USED to fit in 8 megs with no swap, might still fit in 32 with a decent chunk of kernel source. Throw the compile in a loop, add in a processor temperature detector daemon to kill the test and HLT the system if the temperature went too high...
I wonder what bits of the kernel GCC actually needs to run these days? (System V inter-process communication? sysctl support? Hmmm... Would 2.4.anything be a stable enough base for this yet, or should it be 2.2.19? Is 2.4 still psychotic with less swap space than ram (I.E. no swap space at all)?)
Off to play...
Still Rob.
Signature · 4 lines
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