Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 30743
Big Old Bucket O' Badness on AMD Duron
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:31:59 EDT
Where to begin? RH 7.1 beta 2 appears to have significant issues on AMD Duron systems. (Or at least the AMD Duron/Tyan S2390 combo I have.) First, anaconda as shipped with Wolverine has issues crashes regularly on my system, either not installing the kernel (i.e. not completing the install) or installing a corrupt kernel. However, this is fixed in the Rawhide boot disks, so there is no need for a bug for this. Second, the 2.4.1-0.1.9 kernel as installed by default on Wolverine appears to have severe problems with the Duron. It generates spurious SIGSEGVs, corrupts downloads (i.e. MD5 checksum errors), and scrambles the filesystem. This points to either a hardware problem (bad CPU, RAM, or motherboard) or a kernel problem on the Duron. RH 6.2 upgraded to kernel 2.4.2 (stock) does NOT exhibit these problems, so it seems like a kernel thing vs. a hardware thing. Upgrading Wolverine to 2.4.2, and switching from the i686 glibc to the i386 glibc appears to have fixed Wolverine. In other words, I think this is fixed, if you tweak it enough. Solution: - upgrade the kernel to 2.4.2 before release - on Duron systems (detect during install?) do NOT install the i686 glibc, but rather the i386 glibc. Maybe just offer the user a choice? ("Install for compatibility" vs. "Install for performance"; "Choose compatibility if you have problems with a performance install.")
Re-assigning to kernel
Could you try our latest 2.4.2 based kernel available through up2date and in rawhide ?
I did a lateral upgrade from my 2.4.2 to the Rawhide 2.4.2, and both appear to work perfectly fine. I also switched back to the i686 glibc from the i386 glibc, and still no problems (so far.) Linus' changelog for 2.4.1 -> 2.4.2 cites a "serious" IDE driver bugfix; he said it was only seen on ARM, but it seems possible that the Duron could also expose the bug through idiosyncracies in its cache behavior, etc. It seems increasingly probable that this was a kernel bug up through 2.4.1 that is fixed in 2.4.2. (I assume the rawhide kernel is still optimized for i686 and not Athlon/Duron/K7 right? So it's probably not that.) This bug can probably be closed, and I will resurrect if it self-destructs again. :)
Thanks for testing. Our rawhide 2.4.2 kernel contains some workarounds for chipsetbugs that cause corruption on VIA chipsets. I'm glad either this or the generic 2.4.2 code fixed it. Our i686 kernels are indeed Pentium II optimized, but you can make an Athlon specific kernel yourself by doing rpm --rebuild --target=athlon kernel-2.4.2-0.1.XX.src.rpm (closing this bug as fixed in rawhide)