On Sunday September 22 2002 01:48 am, Roland Hughes wrote:
> The reason for the "mem=nopentium" in the lilo is that when the
> kernal was developed there are memory commands/coding that refer to
> pentium only commands. If you are running a Athlon/duron which do not
> have these commands they cause flaky/erratic behaviour. Roly
That's the common misconception, pretty much the first rumor based on
nVidia's first reaction to the 'bug'. But it's not the case, it was a
kernel bug and video driver issue. The kernel was fixed months ago. I
believe XFree86 was also.
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/35/175/7626960/
Note: "There *is* an Athlon/AGP issue. This issue has
*not* been tied to a bug with the Athlon/Duron processors."
...and...
"Our conclusion is that the operating system is creating coherency
problems within the system by creating cacheable translation to AGP
GART-mapped physical memory."
Pay particular attention to this sentence,
"AMD's educated guess is that these Athlon/AGP stability problems have
to do with speculative writes by the CPU and how they can cause
indavertent trashing of AGP memory if pages are mapped with
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
indiscretion by the OS and drivers."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
All mem=nopentium does is to limit pages to 4k, nothing to do with
"pentium only commands".
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
