This problem may have more to do with the way gentoo patches/builds their kernel than it does with standard kernel builds. Sorcerer Linux has some links to the lkml that are relevant to this issue:
http://sorcerer.wox.org/news.html On Sunday 20 January 2002 18:11, Mark Bigler wrote: > The follwing is a quote from http://www.gentoo.org > > ...this is a bug in the actual CPU itself, and is not a Linux bug. > However, it becomes our problem because there are very many > semi-broken Athlon/Duron/Athlon MP CPUs out there. > > Here are the details. As you may know, x86 systems have traditionally > managed memory using 4K pages. However, with the introduction of the > Pentium processor, Intel added a new feature called extended paging, > which allows 4Mb pages to be used instead. Here's the problem -- many > Athlon and Duron CPUs experience memory corruption when extended > paging is used in conjunction with AGP. And, this problem hits us > because Linux 2.4 kernels compiled with a Pentium-Classic or higher > Processor family kernel configuration setting will automatically take > advantage of extended paging (for kernel hackers out there, this is > the X86_FEATURE_PSE constant defined in > include/asm-i386/cpufeature.h.) Fortunately, there is a quick and > easy fix for this problem. If you have been experiencing lockups on > your Athlon, Duron or Athlon MP system when using AGP video, try > passing the mem=nopentium option to your kernel (using GRUB or LILO) > at boot-time. This tells Linux to go back to using 4K pages, avoiding > this CPU bug. In addition, it should also be possible to avoid this > problem by not using AGP on affected systems.
