Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 50926
athlon kernel oopses on T-Bird
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:35:29 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010725 Description of problem: When installing Roswell on an AMD T-Bird 950 equipped machine, the installer installed kernel-2.4.6-3.1.athlon.rpm. This kernel caused my machine to constantly oops. I never managed to finish a boot with this kernel, it always crashed during loading, at different places. Installing the i686 kernel fixed the problem and my system now appears stable. How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Roswell on an AMD T-Bird machine 2. Boot Actual Results: Lots of oopses at random points during startup Expected Results: Complete system boot Additional info:
Same here on a 1,26 GHz Athlon (9,5*133) VIA KT133A, 512MB PC133 RAM, RIVA TNT2 Ultra, no NIC Installed Roswell cleanly on formated ext2 partitions. The kernel just oops on several stages of init processes. Most common failure message is a problem with "InterruptHandler". Not one boot could be finished. Had the same problems with 7.1 after compiling Kernel "Athlon"-optimized. Just oops on boot process. ix86 build kernels work.
There have been several similar reports on the linux-kernel mailinglist, and so far it appears to be a hardware problem. Do you know how many Watts your powersupply is ? What brands are the motherboards ?
My psu is 250 watts iirc, mb is a ABIT KT7A / VIA KT 133A. 256 MB ram.
Could you also give the "lspci" and "lspci -n" outputs ? We might end up not installing the athlon kernel on certain VIA chipsets and that info would help us a great deal in determining which ones. Thanks a lot for helping so far!
Created attachment 26314 [details] lspci
Created attachment 26315 [details] lspci -n
My PS is a 235W one, my motherboard is a SOLTEK SL-75KAV Rev. 8.1 lscpi[-n] follow.
Created attachment 26413 [details] lspci (dib)
Created attachment 26414 [details] lspci -n (dib)
ehm... did anyone ever mention 235W is a very very small PSU for an athlon box ?
I had a similar problem with an Athlon 750. It stalled at loading ram image. This was after choosing lilo as boot loader To solve it I had to do an upgrade choosing grub
I've doubleckecked my PSU, its 300W, so I think we can rule PSU problems out.
We (Red Hat) should try to fix this for the next release.
I checked the the PSU and 235W works definetly for me. I just ripped out all possible PCI devices, same boot result. (oops) The reason here is not lilo or grub - boot from a floppy. As mentioned - with a ix86 kernel the box runs for days without a problem. Tried also hours of hiloads, no problems. The CPU got 530C constantly after hours. For me it looks like a prob in gcc "athlon" optimized code. I couldn4t got just one app running compiling with "athlon". "i686" works great.
We really don't think this is a gcc problem. The athlon kernel puts bigger stress on your system-components, and some machines don't seem to cope with that. 99.9% of the athlons just work, with the exact same kernel image. Why some systems fail is still a mystory.
Now, like baard wrote, the PSU is not the problem. Just bought a 400W one, 300W was not on stock. Tried it, same results. So it seems to be a component problem. Strange. Maybe still problems with VIA support.
VIA is somehow involved; all people with problems were running VIA chipsets. But while a cow is an animal, not all animals are cows.....
I've look that you have a sound blaster live installed.I have the same probleme has you explained in bug 51371, when i remove the sound blaser live all work fine.
Since it's unlikely that we'll get to the bottom of this, I added a commandline option to the athlon kernel to disable the athlon optimisations, so people who have problems can at least boot their system (and maybe get the i686 kernel installed).
I have the same problem (and yes it's a VIA chipset). CPU: 1200 MHz Athlon Motherboard: Microstar K7T Turbo RAM: 2x256 MB Adding attachment with lspci.
Created attachment 28334 [details] lspci from Bjarke
Same problems here on the Asus A7VI-VM motherboard and 1.2GHz Athlon-C (12x100fsb). This board has the VIA KM133 chipset, which is the KT133A with onboard S3 Savage video. I have found that if I explicitly set my RAM to 133MHz, kernel oopses and IDE timeouts occur very frequently. If I set it to 100MHz, it runs flawlessly. Most Athlon motherboards allow you to independently set the MHz frequency in relation to the FSB frequency. Many of my friends with all sorts of other Athlon chipsets have no problems with Linux on their machines when RAM is 33MHz faster than the FSB. This occurs with both the Roswell 1 and 2 default kernel. Same results on four identical motherboards (I bought eleven of them.) Strangely, my friend who bought one of these machines from me says that Mandrake 8.0 works flawlessly even with the 133MHz RAM setting. I'm testing this next. Asus A7VI-VM Motherboard http://www.asus.com/products/Motherboard/socketa/a7vi-vm/
Closing. VIA eventually provided workarounds for PCI fixups and they are in the kernels that are errata or shipping for all supported Red Hat Linux now.