On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Benjamin Scott wrote: => => Yesterday, information became widely available that described possible =>stability issues (system crashes, hangs, etc.) when using an AGP video card =>under Linux in conjunction with an AMD Athlon processor. It was generally =>called a "bug" in the Athlon CPU. => => More information is now available at <http://www.gentoo.org>, including an =>analysis of AMD's response. AMD's official response was posted to LKML, and =>is available at <http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/35/175/7626960/>. => => There is apparently some kind of bad interaction between the AGP GART =>("Graphics Address Remapping Table", I think?), speculative reads performed =>by the Athlon processor, the memory mappings used by the kernel, and cache =>coherency. The details are beyond me, but the practical upshot appears to =>be that the wrong data ends up being written back to main memory at some =>point. => => I recommend reading the above LKML thread if you suspect you are affected =>by this issue. Information is still being uncovered, and it is not =>immediately clear how this occurs, what causes it, who is affected by it, =>and how to work around it. => => In particular, there is some uncertainty as to whether the "mem=nopentium" =>option actually prevents the problem, or merely makes it less likely to =>occur.
I'm not totally stoopid, but I really am not understanding this issue very well. I'd pay money to go to a GNHLUG meeting where someone could explain this to me with only a slightly restricted number of syllables per word. -- -Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have - -happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ -Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- -individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
