Daniel,
I don't believe there's a way to get the bios version while the box is
running. But since the new QQ bios was just released on April 14, 2000 the
bios on those boxes are somewhere behind. Depending on how old they are. I
bought mu BP6 about a month ago and it came with the recalled PW bios which
was giving me all my problems. So it's worth the upgrade no matter what
bios version they are. Even if they do kill the uptime. =P
I hear you about the boxes being 3000 miles away. I just sent my bp6 server
about 3000 miles away for co-location in California. =) Luckily the QQ bios
came out a few days before I shipped it out.
When I had the SMP kernel going on the PW bios it would hand when it was
setting the clock during bootup. It spit out a bunch of kernel oops stuff.
I upgraded to the QQ bios, boot with a uniproc kernel, recompiled with
"Enhanced RTC Support" in the kernel as well as all the other SMP stuff and
it works fine. No lockups yet. Make sure you turn all powersaving functions
off in bios and in linux. I personally removed apmd altogether.
-Jon
----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Veillard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Discussion List for Linux on Abit Motherboards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, April 24, 2000 10:39 AM
Subject: Re: [LINUX-ABIT] Re: Preferred Distribution...
On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 08:24:19AM -0400, Chris Chiappa wrote:
> Without getting into the distro pissing contest, I really doubt there's
any
> material difference in "BP6 stability" between distros. Certainly the
> majority of people on this list run Redhat, and I run Debian and we all
> get/have gotten lockups.
Right. It doesn't seem kernel dependant at all (except for IDE driver
capabilities/instabilities), the infamous hang is kernel agnostic it seems.
I'm typing this from my home machine BP6 based and reliable.
I have built last month 3 new BP6 boxen one is plain unreliable.
I built simultaneously an exactly similar machine, who locked up
earlier so I swapped the MB and this one is now reliable it seems.
I have tried half a dozen kernels on the unreliable box without
any success, including the Gentus distro SMP kernel. I have experienced
lockups with a load of 8 when testing the machine with make -j2
kernel compiles, large du, as well as with completely idle machines.
I have also switched rpmfind.net server to a BP6 it runs with an
uniproc kernel due to IDE/SMP problems, the load is around 3000 IDE
interrupts/sec and is up for 18 days now so it doesn't seems to exhibit
the lockup.
There is *something else* I have always switched APCI and other
power saving features off, switched back to SMP 1.1, etc ...
I doubt it's power supply related, rpmfind.net has just a 250W
power-supply, and 8 drives in it, and looks solid.
One interresting post I have seen was that swapping SCSI brand X
to another one Y fixed the reliablility problem for one person. Someone
also posted to the linux-SMP list the locations in the kernel code
near the place where the processors hung for him. Suspiciously one
of the CPUs was running some of the PCI low level code handling.
Another point worth looking at is that recent BP6 have the CPU thermal
sensor plugged as a blue sensor on top of 2 (long) pins. I had to
push them gently in order to be able to insert the CPUs correctly in the
sockets. Do they have to touch the CPU ? Anyway I have also forced
the CPU fans on in the BIOS.
Is there clear example of the lockup being fixed by upgrading the
BIOS ? I have seen a report taht the utility /sbin/hwclock could hang
the machine and that this could be cured by a BIOS update.
Also is there any way to find the BIOS version from a running system
I don't have physical access to the 3 boxen in the US.
Lots of questions, few answers. Maybe just asking for replacement
mobo until a solid one is found is the easiest method to fix this but
this ain't fun when the box is 3000 miles away <grin/>
Daniel
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