Description of Problem: Upon upgrade from 2.4.7 to Kernel 2.4.9 on a MSI 6378 Board Athlon Celeron 900 System, the kernel panics on reboot. Its a VIA Chipset. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2-4-9 How Reproducible: install on athlon system and boot. Additional Information: this also happens on self-compiled original linux kernels from 2.4.9 on to 2.4.17. It is a known issue of too optimistic athlon optimizations. 2.4.7 kernel output: Jan 10 13:51:13 runes kernel: *** Motherboard with possibly underspec'ed Jan 10 13:51:13 runes kernel: *** voltage regulator or broken VIA chipset bios detected Jan 10 13:51:13 runes kernel: *** Athlon optimisations disabled. The kernel 2.4.7 complained on boot about overoptimistic VIA Chipset settings or underspec voltage regulator and disabled athlon optimizations. Therefore I tried building / Installing i686 kernels instead of athlon kernels. This works stable. The system now runs a i686 compiled 2.4.17 for a while without incident. Suggest: If detecting VIA chipset with these issues, do not install athlon optimized kernels
Even better idea: recently the cause was found and it turns out that some bioses leave the chipset in debugging mode. Our next kernel will turn off that debugging mode and all will be well. In the mean time, passing "noathlon" on the kernel commandline will disable athlon code as well...
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 55040 ***