On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 02:46:12PM -0600, Glenn Johnson wrote: > On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 06:10:09PM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote: > > > I've been using AMD processors almost exclusively in my main work > > machines for over 4 years, and I've been very happy with them. I'm > > currently running a K6/233, a K6/333, an Athlon 750, a Duron 850 and > > an Athlon XP 1700. Last August, though, I bought a machine which gave > > me a lot of trouble, the Duron 850 mentioned above. I found that it > > would freeze for no apparent reason. I established that it wasn't the > > memory by taking the memory of another machine and running it like > > that; it made no difference. I ended up also changing the motherboard > > and the processor, but the hangs continued. I could expect a hang > > within 8 hours when doing 'make release' > > > > Just for the fun of it, I tried running Linux on it. I've been > > running a kernel build and 'make clean' on it now for 36 hours, and > > it's still running fine. Yesterday some Linux friends of mine came > > around and looked at it and told me that the Linux kernel I was > > running on the machine (2.4.16) had had a number of AMD-specific > > fixes put in. He didn't go into more detail, unfortunately, but I'll > > ask him again when I have time: it could be something relating to > > chipset bugs we have seen and fixed. It would help to know, though, > > if other people are experiencing similar problems. Please let me > > know if you're having problems with AMD processors which seem to be > > specific to FreeBSD, especially if they're hangs (i.e. the machine > > stops reacting, but the display still shows the last state, it doesn't > > reboot or panic). > > I have had this exact problem. I have an Epox 8KTA board with a > 1GHz Athlon (Thunderbird) with 256MB of PC-133 memory. I would > consistently get random errors, usually during a compilation, using > the default BIOS settings. After fiddling with some of the BIOS > options, such as enabling PCI burst, the system runs pretty stable. > However, occasionally I will get that freeze that you refer to during a > buildworld. As far as I can tell though if I set the memory clock to > 100MHz the problem goes away completely, or at least I have not observed > it happen yet.
Another thing that struck my mind that bit me once: byte merging or write combine (I forgot the right phrase the bios setup used) was rather fatal for the stability of the machine. Wilko -- | / o / /_ _ email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |/|/ / / /( (_) Bulte Arnhem, The Netherlands To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
