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Linux Software

Athlon Bugs in Linux 2.2? 13

Posted by Cliff from the someone-grab-that-can-o-raid dept.
odo asks: "I'm finding more and more discussion about the Athlon K7 not working with the the Linux v2.2 releases. It seems, from the newsgroup discussions, that I have found that starting on October 6th there have been some people finding problems with the MTRR module being incompatable with the new Athlon chip and causing a kernel panic. It appears to be from the MTRR used in the compiled kernel that comes with many of the popular installations. Which means that you can't even get an installation working enough to be able to fix the kernel. Has any one else seen this?"
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Athlon Bugs in Linux 2.2? More

Athlon Bugs in Linux 2.2?

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  • I have a ASUS K7M and it works great with Mandrake 6.1. My setup... Asus K7m ver 1.04 Diamond Viper Ultra 770 (NVIDIA TNT2) 128 Meg PC 133 2 Ultra DMA 66 drives Tekram SCSI 40x Plextor SCSI

  • SuSE also works under conditions (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have an Athlon @500Mhz.
    SuSE 6.2 installation CD doesn't boot, but there is an updated image for Athlon processors from SuSE itself.
    The problem is really in MTRR but I compiled my kernel with MTRR and it works great (although I think the problem is when you DON't enable MTRR).
    More info at: http://sdb.suse.de/sdb/en/html/snbarth_athlon.html

  • MTRR (Score:2)

    by retep ( 108840 )
    Well for starters it is true. The MTRR support in Linux doesn't work with the Athlon. This has been fixed but as you have found out you need the system bootable for you to be able to get the new kernel. First off see if you can find another computer that you could use. Unlike with Windows you can easily move Linux from one computer to another without running into major problems. Get the harddrive from your Athlon and move it to another computer. Then install Linux on that harddrive on the other computer. Recompile the kernel to remove all MTRR support and then put the harddrive back into the Athlon. You'll need to change some settings such as XWindows settings and mouse settings. But thats pretty easy. For XWindows run XF86Setup on a RedHat machine or xf86config on Slackware or Debian. The mouse settings can be found by running linuxconf on RedHat and by looking in the /etc/rc.d files on Slackware or /etc/init.d files on Debian. If things work right then you can download a new kernel and try getting it to work. Just make sure you don't overwrite your old one!
  • What's the MTRR?

  • MTRR support (Score:3)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Tuesday November 09, 1999 @07:22AM (#1550122) Homepage
    Alan Cox (in his daily log [linux.org]) talked about fixing K7 support when his Athlon arrived.

    (August 19th entry from this [linux.org] page) "AMD Athlon arrives at last. Its fast, very fast and the kernel is not yet optimised for the K7. The first problem I found is that 2.2.x with MTRR support crashes on boot on the K7. Fixed that with some bits from Linux kernel that had been done without a K7 or docs by someone who guessed very well indeed. "

    So get 2.2.13, it should work :-)
    ---

  • It stands for "Memory Type Range Register". Here's the blurb from /usr/src/linux/Documentation/mtrr.txt:

    On Intel Pentium Pro/Pentium II systems the Memory Type Range Registers (MTRRs) may be used to control processor access to memory ranges. This is most useful when you have a video (VGA) card on a PCI or AGP bus. Enabling write-combining allows bus write transfers to be combined into a larger transfer before bursting over the PCI/AGP bus. This can increase performance of image write operations 2.5 times or more.

    The CONFIG_MTRR option creates a /proc/mtrr file which may be used to manipulate your MTRRs. Typically the X server should use this. This should have a reasonably generic interface so that similar control registers on other processors can be easily supported.
  • I have a K7 500 with the FIC SD-11 motherboard running redhat 6.1. I compiled the 2.3.25 dev series kernel on it. But I didn't have any probs using the default kernel provided with redhat. I had no probs installing either. This chip was well worth the wait.
  • I was just wondering if anyone knew if linux supported the ata/66 mode with the via686a chipset on some of the athlon motherboards? I have mine running at ata/33 and would like to switch it over to the ata/66
  • "This is most useful when you have a video (VGA) card on a PCI or AGP bus."

    So does this mean that I could use an ISA video card to prevent the kernel from using the MTRR registers? Would that prevent a kernel panic with those registers?

    Walter


  • Well, I believe all you would have to do is not include MTRR functionality in your kernel when you recompile it. Without support for MTRR, the kernel should just ignore the registers.

  • All seems OK with my Athlon 650 with Redhat 6.1
  • Or just install Linux-Mandrake 6.1. The day I got my Athlon, I popped in the Mandrake CD and had a fully-functional system with absolutely no problems within 30 minutes. And damn fast, too. Thing encodes MP3's faster than my 20Plex can extract the wav's.:)

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