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Athlon Motherboards And Chipsets Under Linux
appletnc from linhardware.com points us to their article about Athlons and Linux. They're trying to sort out the compatibility problems rumored to exist with the boards and chipsets. He says "Despite SuSE's
Athlon workaround and
RedHat's (in)compatibility
note, etc.) and rumors, we have not seen many reports of problems by LhD users. Are Linux users actually experiencing problems with Athlon motherboards? Given that the outstanding price/performance value of the Athlon, the question is how well do Athlon motherboards work under Linux?"
Type 'free' and make sure linux is using all 256megs of RAM.... Sounds like its only using the first 64megs and swapping.... Even in the 2.2.x series, you sometimes still have to specifically put the APPEND="mem=256m" in lilo.conf ....
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I had similar difficulties trying to get 133MHz memory to work in mine. I had a nice (I figured) infineon 128meg stick that wouldn't work at all at 133. 100 works fine though.
I still feel more confident with a good ole intel BX. I've never had a problem with them and they have great support.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Alan has been running an Athlon since they first hit the market. The 2.4pre kernel series has specific Athlon optimizations thanks mainly to Alan. I have installed several Athlon/Linux systems and have *excellent* results too. Mighty fast for the money invested.
Where do these rumors get started? Probably from people that have been computer 'experts' since way back in the win95 days.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I have no problem with my Athlon 500 on a asus K7M board. Except one: I can't manage to make the onboard soundcard working on Linux. It should be eable to emulate a SB Pro, but even this dosn't work. Itwould be very great if someone could send me some tips about it. Thaks by advance!
I am having reasonably serious stability problems since I upgraded my box to an AMD K6-2 500MHz with 128MB RAM on a TMC mainboard. Every now and again, the runtime linker dies and I cannot run any dynamically linked applications -- not very handy.
yeah, if you like bloatware graphical installs.
...or hardware detection that actually works. man i hate that.
Email me with what you've tried and I will let you know what I've tried...
Doug Alcorn
If you have a K7V or are thinking of getting one, bookmark this web site.
I'm generally disapointed with the K7V. It is a new board, only released for a couple months, so bugs should be expected...yet, I was hoping for better. I have a couple other PII Asus boards, and was so happy with them that I took a chance on the Athlon boards.
Here's a sample of the bugs I've encountered: The system will sometimes boot into a BIOS "safe mode" ... and will change all the settings back to the defaults. The system will hang solid, and I can't determine the reason why. Looks and smells like a hardware defect...but I can't tell. Note, I am _not_ overclocking this system, though I was planning on it after the system became reliable. It isn't yet!
On a good note, Asus has attempted to fix the problems it suffers from with frequent BIOS upgrades. Unfortunately, some of the problems are just silly. For example, for a few BIOS revisions you could *not* use a PCI video card...only AGP. The latest BIOS -- 1006 -- fixes a variety of problems like this one, and I expect that most issues will be resolved within a few months.
Some of the problems might be fixed with the 1006 revision...though I'm lothe to upgrade because of some of the problems I've had to work around with other BIOS upgrades.
The built-in sound card might be supported with the latest linux development kernel (2.4pre), and patches are available on some web sites. Search the web site mentioned earlier for details.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I second that. If your hardware is marginal or faulty, you will have problems, no matter what you're running.
Here's my horror story...
For those who are interested in my system specs:
Athlon 500 Processor
Gigabyte GA-7IX mainboard
128M PC100 Ram (single DIMM)
ATI All-in-Wonder 128 AGP
2 9.1 GB SCSI HDs
LS120 IDE drive
SB Live! Value PCI
Linksys 10/100 Eathernet NIC PCI
Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI PCI
USR 56K Voice Faxmodem Pro Ext.
Pioner 6X/32X SCSI DVD-ROM
OS is Mandrake Linux 7.0-2
Long story short...
First mainboard turned out to be DOA out of the box. Second mainboard appeared to be OK, but, after a couple of weeks in operation, the system started crashing...
Here's how bad it was; the crashes were the nasty ones where the system would completely lock-up, and could only be recovered by the L Alt-SysRq song-and-dance. Unfourtunitly, it doesn't always work...
Sometimes the crashes were random, but some of the crashes occoured after certian events (ex. loading a >1MB file to/from the LS120 drive, heavy disk/IO activaty under certian conditions). It even crashed, with a kernel panic, durning an fsck! Meraculessly, the system survived, I was able to repair it, and it's still working (for better or worse), I,m typing this post on it right now. And the crashes left no clues in the system logs (you know that you have a defianate hardware problem if that happens).
Hardware problems are the most diffacult to diagnose, especialy if you don't have hardware testing equiptment, and I know that through painful experance.
I latter determined that the problem was the mainboard, or, more spificly, the mainboard IO bridge. I didn't think it was phyicaly possable, but this sucks, blows, and bites all at the same time.
Rigth now I,m waiting until the replacement MB gets here. Believe me, it's not going to be gigabyte, two bad MBs in a row doesn't inspire confidince in the manufacture's quality control.
Anybody have any thoughts on Tyan's Athlon MB? I decieded to go with that MB because of thier reputation, and it doesn't have these awfull windows-only fetures (ex. AMR slot).
Do the Athlon chips have the Micro$oft flags engraved on their top like all the other K6s ?
And do they still state on their web site that they 'dedicate ourselves in making CPU for the Micro$oft Window$ Operating System$' ?
Understand who wants. >:)
"People are not schizophrenic usualy: They tend to be white inside AND outside, OR, black inside AND outside"
I recently bought an Athlon 700 and a Shuttle AI61 motherboard. I was using SuSE 6.2 at the time, with kernel 2.2.10. It refused to even load the kernel right, wouldn't even come close to booting. I got SuSE 6.4 with the 2.2.14 kernel and it has worked fine ever since.
-Ross
I have an MSI 6167? motherboard with an Athlon 500 and have been running Slackware 7.0 for a few months now. Since I first installed it I compiled several newer versions of the kernel including 2.2.13, 2.2.15, 2.3.99-pre3, 2.3.99-pre5, and 2.3.99-pre6. Also installed XFree 86 4.0, word perfect, star office, afterstep and several other packages.
I've also swapped out some hardware: TNT2-M64 video card, ATI Rage 128 Pro video card, ne2000 compatible 10 Mbps card, and a linksys 10/100 ethernet adapter.
I love the MSI motherboard. It has the ability to boot whatever drive I want in any order, which allows me to install Lilo and MS-DOS menu boot sectors on 2 harddrives to preserve at least 2 separate Win 98 installations and boot various linux kernels without openning the case.
I have no complaints and never really had any problems besides the lack of 3D support for both the TNT2 and ATI video cards, and absence of the linksys driver in the linux kernel (but that was easy to compile).
Considering that upon buying my athlon system, win98 needed a complete re-install, while my Slackware 7 box booted right up and purred away. I guess it works pretty damn good. I've yet to have anything out of the ordinary go wrong.
I've been using a 600 MHz Athlon with FICs SD-11 board (plus ATI Rage Fury) and I had major problems (Mandrake 7.0 and SuSE 6.4): 1. The kernel didn't see my 256 MB RAM without 'append="mem=256m"' in lilo.conf. 2. Every once in a while the system crashes as if someone had touched the reset button. 3. The system crashes immediately if I use any APM features. I hate to say it, but I don't have problems 2 and 3 with Windoze 98. The only good thing is that Win2k wasn't even able to install itself on this puppy... :)
I have an Athlon 750 w/ the ASUS K7V (KX133) board.
An interesting note about this board is that on the box, listed among its various features is a Linux 'icon', with a checkmark and the text "linux-tested.com". Apparantly this is some sort of certification for Linux hardware.
I was curious about this, so I went to linux-tested.com and read up. Asus actually paid these guys money to put this board through various Linux tests (both distro and non-distro specific), and it passed everything. This is a really nice thing for Asus to do, and I thank them for it.
If you have a K7M motherboard make sure you update your BIOS to version 1009 or later. There is a _serious_ boost in cache performance with this BIOS update. I was happy before the BIOS update, I am even happier now.
Red Hat 6.x always worked fine, Mandrake 7.x will also work, as does Slackware 7.0 -- I guess the main point is that as long as you're using something recent, everything should be fine.
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
Okay, where can I get this updated version? At least I know why I could never get agpgart to work on my system...
Your problems are likely not Athlon or KDE related.
It may instead have to do with what kernel you're running. Apparently, the later 2.3.XX kernels have VM performance issues, and Alan Cox's Diary hints that 2.2.15 also may have some issues. (I'd give an exact entry date, except that I can't seem to get to the site right now. It was sometime in the last week or two.) I looked at the SuSE USA website, and noticed that SuSE 6.4 comes with Kernel 2.2.14. I'm not sure if it has the same VM issues that Alan was referring to wrt. 2.2.15.
Interestingly, from what I remember reading in the Linux Kernel mailing list archives, the problems are worse on large-memory machines.
--JoePS. Why is it that nobody seems to be able to spell A T H L O N correctly?
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Program Intellivision!
I'm running suse 6.4 without problems
clancey
Take a look at http://www.amd.com/about/glance.html
"AMD provides Windows compatible processors".
So AMD is saying not willing to embrace Linux.
So why bothering with M$-designed CPUs ?
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If Internet is Freedom, Linux is Democraty
Does anyone know of any dual or quad mobos for Athlons? Thanks.
Got me a nice new Athlon system I put together a couple months ago. FIC SD-11 revision 1.8, Athlon 650MHz, 128 MB SDRAM, Western Digital 10 GB Ultra66 hard drive, Sound Blaster (ES1371 AudioPCI), Matrox G100 AGP, generic Realtek 10/100 etherne. Running RedHat 6.2. It's been going for several months now, and I've had no trouble at all with it.
:) Most, if not all, vendors should have the new boards in stock by now. Just make sure they have a reasonable return/exchange policy, in case you accidentally get ahold of some old stock.
The FIC board has been great. Erm, more specifically... the r1.8 FIC board has been great. Previous revisions were fraught with problems,
When FIC fixed 'em in r1.8, tho, it was unfortunately too late to reverse the damage done to their reputation in the public's eye.
But if you're looking for a good, cheap (got mine put together for under $500) Athlon system, the FIC won't disappoint. Provided you get r1.8.
--
Yomigaeru Aiyan Geek!!!
My workstation an Athlon 600 on a FIC SD-11 with 254Megs and a TNT2 card. It started life as an NT machine, so I got to work a lot of the bugs out of it then. Mainly just a new power supply (at least 300W) and 4 different sdram sticks. It is really picky about memory.
Once JBuilder 3.5 came out I wiped nt and installed RedHat 6.2. I had zero problems with the install. And in normal usage it's fine.
But I can make it kernel panic by opening 8 SetiAtHome sessions and every large app I have on the machine. I'm not sure if this is due to flakey memory/motherboard or some kernel issue. I still need to make the newest kernel and update the bios. But not in that order.
FWIW
minniger
Athlon != K6
Athlon = K7
Actually it's quite stupid on the part of RedHat to list AMD K7 in Tier 2 hardware, but ALL
K7-based mobos in Unsupported!
According to Ace's hardware, AMD has announced the 760 chipset. A variant soon to follow, the 760MP, will have SMP support. All the AMD reps will say is that these chipsets are due in the second half of this year (thanks for narrowing it down). Tyan supposedly has a motherboard planned to be released before the new year that will have dual Athlon support. Head over to Ace's Hardware and search for "760MP".
My only issue is that this will allow two processors. We just got a server here at work with quad Pentium III Xeon 550MHz. Wow. I want that for my Athlon system.
Not that I imagine for a moment that there haven't been problems with Athlon motherboards and systems. But there's no mention of "i820", "Cape Cod", "MTH" or "Rambus" anywhere, even though the Compatibility List as a whole was updated just last Friday. Moreover, the "Tier 1", "Tier 2" business is straight out of Intel's and Microsoft's playbooks for the power games they play with their resellers, big customers, "partners" and the like. (Remember the story of Microsoft's "Tier 1 OEMs" and the Windows 95 desktop from the trial?) Funny to see it turning up in a Linux distribution's HCL...
In this light, passages like "Non-Intel clone CPUs. These CPUs may not be any more "buggy" than pure Intel CPUs, but since the market size of these chips is smaller, what problems do occur seem to be harder to get around." look like subtle but classic IBM-school FUD. Paranoia is not my drug, and Red Hat is not my Great Satan, but I think I smell something fishy here.
I have an Asus K7M motherboard with an Athlon 700, and absolutely no problems at all. Well.. at least not since the latest (not in the kernel yet) patch to agpgart anyways. Direct rendering in X woowoo :-)
I have a Biostar M7MkE that runs RH6.2 just fine. I use a SCSI disk system and ignore the IDE in Linux. The M7MkA I originally had had some bus failures and the replacement was the M7MkE. I turned off the mobo sound and USB (not enough interrupts and Linux wouldn't see the sound card properly), and RH6.2 installed and runs really well. I'm using a SB PCI 128 card and a3dFX Voodoo3 3k agp video card. FYI, I can't get Windows to install to the IDE drive because of a driver issue!!! I think I'll just stick with Linux. As far as Biostar, the mobo seems pretty good, but the company is pretty useless. Manuals are impossible and support is non-existent.
The box said WindowsNT or better so I loaded Linux
I've been running a K7 under linux since the first K7 700 was out and have not found a problem yet.
Trevor Taylor -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCS/M d+@ s+: a?(---) C+++(++) UL++(+++)>++++ P+>+++ L
Been running Mandrake 7.0 and 7.1 beta for a while now with no problems... go figure =)
I am running 2.2.13 plain vanilla on a Asus K7M with an Athlon 600 with absolutely no problems. This is the first I have heard at all of any problems.
I have been using an Athlon-based server for a fairly critical server for awhile now, and there have been no bumps in the road. Perhaps the users experiencing problems are actually having hardware problems with a bad batch of motherboard chipsets or improper Athlon cooling. I have noticed that some third party coolers for the Athlon look flimsy and extremely cheap.
I have set up a couple machines with Mandrake 7 (sweet install, BTW) with no issues at all. Athlon 700 and 550's, Microstar 6167 and Abit KA7 (rockin boards in their respective generations)and have sen no problems.
A friend with the Microstar and a 750 Athlon also seems to be cruising fine. Not sure whast the fuss is about...
I have an Athlon 500 (Biostar MoBo) from October, hardly a month after they were released, and never had a problem with it. It flies in every respect; gotta love those fast kernel compiles. the 2.3 and 2.4 kernel has nice Athlon stuff in it which seems quite stable (well, I've never had a problem). I've been running 2.3 for months now, and it's all good. Also the next version of GCC (EGCS??) will have a -march=athlon switch for Athlon optimizations. You can get the latest CVS version of GCC from the codesorcery website (don't compile a kernel with it though, bad things happen... :)
---- Gee, I wish I could read Kanji...
According to the recent Kernel Traffic:
This week, Matthew Vanecek complained that although plenty of folks were talking about how 'kswapd' was broken, he couldn't find any patches to fix it. He asked if a fix was available, and Rik van Riel replied, "People on the linux-mm mailing list are fixing things as we speak... http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/"
Elsewhere, under the Subject: PATCH: Possible solution to VM problems, Juan J. Quintela posted a few iterations of a patch to improve the poor performance of recent development kernels, in particular the problem with 'kswapd' using up 100% of the CPU.
I think there is a patch out now for this "X is sluggish / Disk Activity" thing going around.
I'm using an Epox 7KXA (via kx133) and an Athlon 700. Everything here works beautifully. NVidia DRI, Onboard sound...
Sure, I've had some problems with GL apps crashing XF4 but I blame X and nvidia for that.
I have Caldera 2.3 and 2.4 running on my Athlon 700 system using the KA7. I had no problems installing the OS on the system, but all sorts of troubles with Windows 98 and 2000.
Overall, I don't love the KA7 like most people. Check out my review for more information.
Also, the BeOS would install, but not run on the system.
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
The last comment in the article is very interesting.
"...the question is how well do Athlon motherboards work under Linux?"
So, you're basically comparing how well a motherboard/cpu has been designed for a certain operating system??? That's like all those dodgy stickers on the front of machines saying "Designed for Windows NT" etc.
What next? Boxes with "Designed for RedHat Linux" on them? Instead, why not have "Designed really well, all you OS coders should now get to work taking advantage of this great motherboard/cpu!".
Motherboards/cpus should not be designed for an operating system. They should be designed to be the best it can be (obviously part of that is being compatible with existing hardware etc), but the overriding concern when designing hardware shouldn't be how well it works for software. Software can be changed comparitively easily, hardware design is a lot more expensive.
email me or not.
APPEND="MEM=160M"
in lilo.conf. I haven't done much heavy lifting with the box yet, but it seems problem-free so far.
One viagra in the morning before work; I just know I'm gonna be screwed
Yeah,
I'm fixing to order a 1ghz Athlon on a FIC SD11 Motherboard with 384 of Ram (Booyaa), anyone heard of any problems with this setup (mobo or chip) on redhat 6.2(without any patches or upgrades)?
Thanks for your help
This might be even more trouble, but you can remove the IDE drive when you reinstall Linux (how often do you reinstall?).
If you get one of those neat racks that mount in one of your 5.25 bays this is a snap!
But I don't know if it's athalon related or not, might be the video card... But I'm getting crappy performance under X... We're talking I click to close a window, and the mouse freezes for a few seconds , then is sluggish, then the window closes and everthing is okay. Launching an app also grinds the system to a crawl. Same behaviour with various window managers, although some seem better than others. The system is a Athalon 850 with 256 megs RAM, a Matrox G400 w/32 megs of RAM, Asus VX133 motherboard, and a Maxtor 7200 RPM UltraDMA-66 drive. If anyone has any idea what might be causing this slowness or how I can track it down to a specific component, please share!
I kept getting all these NO SPACE LEFT ON DEVICE messages. It must be a defective motherboard
A friend suggested that I try typing rm -rf / to solve the problem but then nothing would work
I am never buying another APOGEE motherboard as long as I live and I don't care what their lawyers do to me for saying so.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Just built a Athlon 650 on a FIC SD-11, which is probably the weirdest Athlon motherboard out there. Not bad, just weird and somewhat picky.
There were some issues:
1) The VIA ATA/66 chipset on board + linux didn't like my Maxtor 30GB HD using DMA when my CD-RW drive was running, and would cause hard locks. I replaced it with a Seagate ATA/66 IDE drive, and all is well.
2) The Irongate AGP is only recently well supported for DRI, and probably still needs some polish.
3) The interactivity does get somewhat sluggish with XFree 4.0 when there is a lot of hard drive activity.
4) The interactivity under X was extremely slow until I turned on UDMA on the hard drive using hdparm.
That all said, the system is quite fast and extremely stable, once I got the HD situation figured out.
I think that the IDE support needs some work for VIA Athlon chipsets (which is an experimental patch for the kernel, BTW), but other than that, no problems.
jf
I'm typing this sitting in front of an athlon 550 with FIC SD11 motherboard. It's been working great with both redhat 5.2 (plus security patches, including an updated Xfree86 3.x) and redhat 6.2 (plus security patches, not including an updated XFree). I had to fiddle a bit to get X running on 5.2, but 6.2 worked right out of the box.
The video card is an AGP Matrox Millenium G400.
I haven't tried 3d on it at all.
I got it from LinuxIt! computers in San Diego.
On the other hand, the celeron system next to me that we built from scratch has been having problems, one of which is preventing me from using it for its primary purpose.
My K6/2 at home crashes infrequently (or at least it did running 6.1; it hasn't crashed since I upgraded to 6.2, but it was such an infrequent crash that it could still be waiting to surprise me
So in my experience, of the x86 compatible machines I'm currently closest to, the athlon has been the most reliable.
HUH? I just looked at online stores this morning, and Athlons are EXACTLY the same price as their Intel counterpart chips (where they exist). I don't see any big discounts. If you do, PLEASE let me know, I deperately need a new 900 MHz Athlon :)
lf.o
Confirmed working - Asus K7M, rev 1.2, with K7-700 @ 100. AGP card: Guillemot GeForce 256.
I've had problems with the dynamically linked setiathome 2.4 binary. It seemed to cause random hard lockups. I didn't see any sign of trouble in the logfiles.
The problems with setiathome disappeared when I switched to a statically linked version.
BTW, I'm running Slackware 7, upgraded to a 2.2.15 kernel. It has glibc-2.1.2.
What I can't understand is how this could happen. It seems to me that something must have gone wrong while the program was in kernel-mode. But what?
Also the X-server from NVidia for my TNT2 card caused intermittant lockups. I haven't tried XFree86 4.0 yet.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Actually, even 2.3.99-pre kernels still incorrectly set the defaults on the mtrr for memory. On bootup, the kernel defaults to setting the mtrrs to write-through which is singificantly slower (by a facot ro something like 5x slower) than setting them to write-back. I still have to use a bootup script to correctly set the mtrrs. I've wondered how many other people have this problem.
I'm using an Asus K7M w/ a 600 MHz Athlon.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I'm not sure about RH4.2, but I can verify that Mandrake 7.x works quite well. If there were any problems, it would be due to the Athlon MTRR code, which as I recall, caused the kernel not to boot on 2.2.12 and earlier.
I started using the "Magic Smoke" Theory of Electronics years ago; I must be getting REALLY old if it is now showing up in jargon. BTW, although I know that I did not hear of the usage before I started using it, I do not doubt that some, or many, others came up with it independently. My version (Transistors work becasue they are filled with Magic Smoke; the proof is that when the Magic Smoke is released, they no longer function.) was somewhat derived from Niven's Law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.) and based on the observation that to most people electronics is a "sufficiently advanced technology".
I was rather amused to see a mention of the magic smoke in this page - http://www.redhat.com/support/hardware/intel/62/rh 6.2-hcl-i.ld-2.html Tier 3 Incompatible and Unsupported CPUs Smokeless CPUs: Smokeless CPUs are incompatible with the linux kernel and it is doubted that any work will ever be performed to change this. They are simply too unreliable in even the most standard system configuration. Those with a CPU missing its Magic Smoke should switch to a new CPU. If you're not familiar with magic smoke, read : http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/magic -smoke.html Personally, I wouldn't have put that in there. It's funny, but it's likely to confuse people who haven't heard the term before.
Ive got an Athlon 600 on a MSI K7-PRO board /w
128MB 6ns 2-2-2 PC100 RAM
Mind to get high quality RAM modules if youre using AMD chipsetted mobos. They really depend on it. Though Linux ran much more stable then Windoze with generic PC133 modules. But I changed back to a PC100 branded one. Runs rock solid and takes full advantage of the SuperBypass mode (AMD chipset specific feature).
Still it short of ATA66 support under SuSE6.3 which Im still using. Not much performance for the harddrive.
Apart from that its screaming.
If youre having problems check the athlon newsgroup... Most comprehensive information on anything from K6-2 to Athlons
Dsyncd
-Will work for bandwidth
I haven't had a problem at all. I have an Athlon 550 on a FIC SD11 mobo. Kicks names and takes ass.
I've always found GNOME to be the slow one... I've run both and KDE is the smaller one, and with Linux's agressive disk caching it runs a lot faster then Windows for what I do. (software development (meaning lots of terminal windows open) and Netscape)
XWindows does use a client/server model. That's why in general graphics performence is worse then the more low-level (but not client/server capable) model of Windows. This lets you remotely run apps, but it also slows graphics performence. I've not found it to be much of a problem but then again I don't use any games.
IIRC shared memory is not used for communication, UNIX sockets are.
I know, you would think that they would, not just for Athalon but for K6 also. Lets see here, K6-450's = ~$100.. so for $400 and the motherboard (lets assume another $400), you could have a dirt cheap 1800mhz SMP system. They could make a fortune selling to the broke *nix geek crowd! From what I have read, it seems that K6 and Athalon are perfectly capible of SMP, providing sombody starts making a chipset that can do it. It really is a shame that they have not done this yet.
No significant problems from here, running (at school) an FIC something-or-other board (AMD chipset) w/ 650mhz Athlon and Slackware 7.
;)
Only issue I had with this config. is the trouble I had getting UDMA to work - I had to work in a 2.3.99-pre kernel; of course, UDMA is always a pain to get working... now if I didn't use a wrong hdparm -X and screw up the partition it'd work even better
I'm running Linux 2.2.15 on an Athlon 700 with an ASUS K7M. It sure beats the K6/200 I used to have. Full kernel builds fly in under 4 minutes. For those of you with an ASUS board, you might want to check to ensure that your BIOS is up to date. A recent BIOS patch fixed L2 cache timings, which could majorly increase your CPU performance.
My uptime so far:
6:06pm up 21 days, 25 min, 11 users, load average: 0.06, 0.05, 0.01
I (and a bunch of hardware sites) highly recommend this board, especially if you don't want that STUPID, WORTHLESS "AMR" slot and built-in AC97 ("what's a s/n ratio?") audio.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Although I do not always agree with governments or organizations taking control over "mundane aspects", I feel that the need for standardization and improved quality in both hardware and software are in order:
Why does Microsoft Windows take "forever" to boot up? It has to check a huge database of possible devices that may have been added to your system while it was powered down. It is no longer just a "device probe" to the various ports common equipment is found on; it is a comprehensive check of mapped I/O memory, devices that may be on the parallel port, and responses to "poking" certain registers, etc.
If a committee or group were to decide on (a) an extendable hardware implementation that could last a good number of years, and (b) independent certification and quality review of source code; we would all benefit. Examples?
Today's software has it's own problems: Application developer's "take advantage" of increased CPU "horsepower" by using lax coding methods. The e-mail application I use it work (Banyan's Beyond Mail 3.n release) uses a bubble sort (or equivalent performance) algorhythm, and yet qsort() is part of the ANSI C specification! I've seen repetitive sequential searches done on databases exceeding 100K records. And let's not forget the quality assurance issues that plague us so. I.E., if it's barely scaleable and only annoyingly slow and buggy, it's OK to release to the public so they can alpha-test for us!
It's definitely time to move forward to a new and more rigid standard to protect both individuals and business. Will it be expensive in the transition? Yes. The current popular PC architecture will have to be replaced. After the initial investment, however, we should be able to rest easy. It would be good, once again, to have faith in commercial software. And, also to have security in knowing that the hardware industry will not leave us "in the dust" with a useless, proprietary technology that is taking up space in the attic or closet.
Nope. Good power supply, works great, except for the few little picky things I mentioned, which are all compatiblity or code maturity problems.
jf
I've not been able to make agpgart work for me, but I haven't tried the most recent patch yet, either. Apart from that, the thing runs like a champ.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've got a ASUS K7V w/PC 133 RAM and a Athlon 700 running Mandrake 7.0. It's been working flawlessly since day 1. With the ide patch I've got UDMA 66 working flawlessly and can stress this box out without it flinching at all.
I highly recommend it.
-- darron@froese.org
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I have Athlon 700 with Biostar Motherboard with Mandrake 7.02 installed in it. Along with that, is the Matrox G400 Dual Head Monitor, Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder Card, DVD Drive, and SoundBlaster Live! Platinum. Never had a problem with them at all with dual 13.4 Gigs IBM Desktar 7200 drives.
The only issue I came across is the memory chips which can be an issue with certain motherboards depending on the quality of the memory and who made them. I used to have PC100 cheap ram stick and frankly, it causes the machine to locks up once a while. So I upgraded it to PC133 Micron memory chip and violia.... it works like charm and never had a lockup for past 4 months since I had it running without any shutdown.
One advice, be sure to check on the quality of the power supply and the memory chip since they can be real picky on those. BTW...did I mention that I have 512Meg of RAM here?
Cannot wait for another development machine from my client which will be even more fun...which I specified 1Gig Athlon, Asus Motherboard and 512Meg of Ram...with probably Matrox G400 unless Matrox come out with something newer. Not exactly partial to GeoForce Chips til they get the drivers GPLed for X Servers.
Anyone got any advice on where to purchase the Alpha Motherboards and Processors directly instead of getting pre-built machines? Wanna to get those.
-- Amazing how the Internet still humms along.... -- Dispite all the flaws of Micro$oft in their software!
From my experiences, the first problem you mentioned didn't seem to be a problem with the kernel but was a problem in the motherboard BIOS.
I had purchased an Athlon 600 with a BCM/GVC motherboard (QS750) around the time the Athlons came out. I had a lot of problems for some time with programs crashing in Windows at random times. I installed Red Hat 6.0 at that time after I was unable to boot Mandrake Linux 6.0. AFAIK, the only difference between the kernels in the two distributions (in ver. 6 of each, at least) is that it is optimized for Pentium processors in Mandrake (along with all the other packages in Mandrake), but I could be wrong (did Mandrake 6 come out later with possibly a more recent kernel?). I had no problems running anything in Red Hat.
In December last year, BCM/GVC finally released a patch to their motherboard that was made to fix problems with Athlon 700's & 750's. Not stated on the site was that it also fixed many problems with running things with ALL processor speeds. Programs didn't crash anymore in Windows, so I decided to try installing Mandrake again. Sure enough, it booted and ran with no problems.
Other people may have had different results, but this is at least what happened for me...
AFAIK This refers to an old hardware joke which gave the reason why any particular chip didn't work as "The Blue Smoke has escaped".
Hence a smokeless CPU = a CPU that is broken.
-p
Maybe Im being dumb, but what the HELL is the 'Smokeless CPU' mentioned as Tier 3 Incompatible and Unsupported CPU. Is this a gag, a real chip, or some bizarre reference to underclocking for heat-disspiation prevention?
And you can phone a friend...
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
I honestly don't know what the problem is. I have been running a Gigabyte GA7IX with an Athlon 600. Not a problem to report at all. Aside from having to force it to recognize all 128 megs of ram.
At different times I have had Mandrake 6.1, Mandrake 7, and Corel distros all on here. Every one worked fine. Oh yeah, and Debian as well.
Athlon 800
ASUS K7V
PC133 256 MB
GeForce DDR
This works as a charm with Debian Potato. Just remember to disable PnP OS in BIOS before you install.
Big Athlon Problems!!! Score:1, Offtopic
by cave76 on Wednesday May 31, @01:41PM PST (#13)
(User Info) http://members.tripod.com/cave76/
Yeah, I've had tons of problems with Athlons and the chipsets. I can't afford one!!! Anyyone, feel free to send one on over and I'll be glad to tell
you if I find any incompadibilities.
Off Topic? This is clearly "Funny"
I hope you get bitchslapped you slutty moderator, prostituting your points like that.
Lars -
-That's right -- if you run Window2000, you're in front of it.
I think this means that Window2000 is in front of technology as far as being "in the way of" and "holding back progress".
Lars -
[I can only verify that this works on an Asus K7M and may not even work for your Asus K7M. Do not do this if you feel litigious or are just plain retarded. You have been warned.]
Go into the BIOS setup area. Then go to Advanced. Arrow down to Internal cache. It might say write-thru or enabled or something. Hit F5. A little box will come up saying "Load Optimal Settings." Hit Enter. It should now say "Reserved." At this point, you need to go back into your other settings and configure things back the way you wanted them.
As an aside, you have to go through this whole rigamarole EVERY TIME you enter the BIOS. Yay Asus.
As another aside, a friend of mine discovered this while I was visiting him and other friends for a Local Area Network Object. This was a several-hundred-mile trip and involved the purchase of a moose. 3=) 3=) 3=).
This whole thing about incompatiblities is yesterdays news. The SuSE workaround was for version 6.0 or 6.1, I don't recall. The workaround was for a kernel problem having to do with MTRR support and has long since been fixed. The perceived hardware problems involve ATA66 support or the use of old ram which the newer motherboards seem to baulk at. This is hardly an Athlon only issue. I'm sure when the next round of Intel products are introduced, we should expect the same type of incompatibility horror stories. But what do you expect from untested, by the masses, technology? I'm running an Athlon 700 on a MS-6195 motherboard with SuSE 6.4 as my operating system. It's blindingly fast and stable. Quake3 and Unreal Tournament run without a hickup, I'm very, very happy with the Athlon.
Actually, Linux beats anything, anyway, but, that's a given.
I'm running an Athlon 600 (for about 6 mos.) with a WDC 5400 rpm drive (which I sacrificed for NT/98 {never used}), and, an IBM 7200 rpm used as master primary for all Linux.
Slackware 7.0, out of the box, in 7 minutes, including X-Windows, KDE, etc.
Builds a kernel in 2 minutes. >:)
SB AWE 64, which cranks some nice 16-bit sound (don't bother w/ 8-bit). Nice looking Voodoo 3000, and a 10/100 Kingston.
Pumps out setiathome work units in 7 1/2 hours. I believe that's better than a decent SGI. Not quite a compaq tru-64 Alpha, but, at $500 for the CPU/mobo, tough to beat.
NT can't even install on this beast unless I compile the kernel with NTFS rw and nurse that moron through the process through interesting Linux expert fdisk options.
So, if anyone can't load a default Slack 7.0 on an Athlon........ no words.......
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
The machine:
ASUS K7V, 800Mhz Athlon256MB PC133Mhz
ASUS GeForce 6800 DDR
Miro PCTV
I recently bought this machine and installed Mandrake 7.0. It has been working for the past four days without a problem. The only problem is I'm trying to get the on-board sound card (using AC'97 compatible via82cxxx module) to work but without success (yet). The TV card using xawtv works with overlay using 2.3.99pre9 kernel.
I have spent the last week searching for information on various items on hardware and linux information. An interesting sites about linux and the Athlon which I have just found (will be applying some of these advice tonight):
http://apollo.ppm.u-psud.fr/athlon.html - Building a stable Athlon system...Documentation on via82cxxx patch-2.3.38
Looking at the links on the first link, there is mention of optimisation flags that you can used to speed up some application for the Athlon under linux. Cool!
Kris
Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/
Kriston
Anyway, Linux runs like a champ on my Athlon. I hate it when I have to boot back into Windows just to play Tribes. I did have to add a mem line to lilo.conf (all 128MB wasn't being detected) but that was the only oddity. Whether that was because of chipset issues or not I never found out. I meant to look into it, but haven't had the time.
Oh yeah, one more thing: I've got SCSI everything in that box (Apaptec 2940U2W, Quantum Atlas 10K, Plextor CD and CD-R in case you were curious; they all work great). If I remember correctly, the chipset problems happened a lot with newer IDE controllers. Maybe I skirted the problem with SCSI, I don't know.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Hmm.. to start this I should say which Athlon systems I know by hand. 1 Kryotech 700@900MHz on a Microstar MB with 3/4gB ECC RAM. 6 clusternodes running 600MHz on Asus K7M with normal RAM (1 part). 1 600MHz on a Microstar MB with 384mB MCT RAM and 1 600MHz with a MB I don't know. Almost all of the machines there has had problems with RAM which we've had to change. All the PSU's in the cluster-nodes has been changed due to lack of quality. They have passed memtest-2.2 and still they crash with VM-kernel errors. The Kryotech machine is the worst of them all. In the half year we've had it has not had an uptime of more than a week. RAM has been changed several times and the BIOS has been flashed as well. Several kernels has been tried but nothing works. Worst of all it seems like Kryotech couldn't care less...
Only one of the computeres (the one with a MB I don't know) has been stable. All of the others crash every once in a while.
Whether it's hardware related or it's due to some bad code in the kernel I don't know. One thing is for sure. I would not bet on an Athlon for production use.
I couldn't ask for a more stable machine. Shhhh...it even makes Windows pretty stable. I was a little surprised that i586-optimized Mandrake runs on it without batting an eyelash.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Two problems relating to the SD11, both now resolved:
1. The mtrr handling error was fixed by upgrading the kernel.
2. The system would spontaneously reboot every 20-40min, less if under load. I ended up swapping out the power supply, memory, and several cards before a FIC rep told me that there were power management problems on early revs of the SD11 (mine was "0253" -- 028x on were ok if memory serves me right). FIC tech support were up-front and professional, and issued an RMA directly, not thru the retailer. While the problem was irritating, the replacement quick. The system's been running flawlessly since then (7-8 months).
I think not...(*poof*)
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it but it made no difference. I think the KA7 / SB PCI 128 incompatibility is a genuine problem, based on the volume of people reporting it in alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.abit.
It seems very related to the size of the sound buffer. It doesn't hang if the buffer is made to be very small, but with a large buffer, it regularly locks up and then comes back after a while.
personally, I'd recommend either the Epox 7KXA or the Asus K7M, but that's just me
I wouldn't recommend K7M, go for the newer K7V, it's got the via chipset for agp which supposedly works a little faster, and also has current kernel support. The K7M uses the irongate chipset and the agp support for that is not fully patched into the kernel yet.
I have had Mandrake 7.0 running on 650MHz Athlon with Asus K7M board for a while now and have had absolutely no problems.
On the other hand, the system came preinstalled with Windows 2000, which for some strange reason caused the whole computer to completely hang every 15 minutes or so. Extremely annoying. Although I have some experience battling with Microsoft software, I couldn't figure it out even though I tried different drivers for each device and even other hardware configurations. Must be a feature or something.
I'm waiting for a multi-processor board, too. Ideally they would release their Durons with a multi-processor mobo at the same time, but I'll probably have to wait for that. Too bad, I'm looking to upgrade my mobo in the next couple of months.... I'll just have to stick with a single athlon.
I got brand new Athlon 750 + AOpen MB. Weird things, it runs only 1/2 the speed under BeOS. Yes only 375Mhz! I've only once seen it run at full speed, perhaps I'll try every setting in the BIOS someday... Have you checked what Bogomips reports?
J.
>me two chips at once!
agreed! I'm waiting for an excuse to repurpose
my k6III... I would love dual Athlon 750's...
Amazing magic tricks
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
http://www.irisa.fr/prive /dmentre/smp-faq/smp-howto-3.html
3. x86 architecture specific questions
1.Can I use my Cyrix/AMD/non-Intel CPU in SMP?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: Intel claims ownership to the APIC SMP scheme, and unless a company licenses it from Intel they may not use it. There are currently no companies that have done so. (This of course can change in the future) FYI - Both Cyrix and AMD support the non-proprietary OpenPIC SMP standard but currently there are no motherboards that use it.
Lars -
I recently built a really nice athlon box for Linux. I used the EPoX EP-7KXA Motherboard, which utilizes the Via KX133 Chipset. The mobo rocks, it does 4x AGP, UDMA 66, and is very overclockable. It is also very important to note that it was inexpensive. The box runs super fast and has never crashed. There's my 2c.
--Evan
running rh6.2 and FIC 700Mhz AMD, no problems, very, very fast!
Yeah, I've had tons of problems with Athlons and the chipsets. I can't afford one!!! Anyyone, feel free to send one on over and I'll be glad to tell you if I find any incompadibilities.
I thought everything was ok, but I noticed that things are a bit sluggish when running KDE. I don't think I've ever noticed that when playing with KDE/Linux before--and on much slower machines. For instance, I was installing Star Office while playing an MP3, and not only was the installation dog slow, but the MP3 cut in and out as well. No offence, but I can do that and much more under Win2K on the same machine. I can even do it with Win98 SE. Something just isn't right.
I also notice that the mouse is sluggish when navigating through menus, especially if another program is running. Response is far from immediate when I click on icons to load programs, or browse files. I can't tell you what Internet browsing is like, since my external modem is still on order, and all I had to put in the box was an old ISA Plug 'n Pray modem.
All that to say, Linux seems tired and sluggish on an Athelon 600 with loads of RAM--and Win2K blazes on the same machine.
--SpookComix
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
Been running Linux (RH 6.2 briefly, mainly Slack 7) on my Athalon 650/Asus K7M with no problems. I have a V3-2000 PCI so I don't know about the AGP issues, although this was the first time I'd heard of any problems with the Athalon. 2.2.12 worked fine out of the box and 2.3.99-pre6 even has a nifty "Athalon" option under CPU type :) Woohoo!
Oh, one minor problem, I had to do the 'append mem=256M' thing in my lilo.conf, no biggie.
Yet they were bought out by Intel, so the use of this technology won't happen.
Good to see some comments about the possibility of SMP and Athlon.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
There were two problems with running Athlon machines. First, the Memory Type Register Range support was broken in old kernels. Any new distribution should support them. If the kernel hangs before mounting the drives, try a later versions.
Second was the AGP problems. These are still getting worked out, but it looks like there are working drivers for certain kernel versions. I believe these are yet to be merged in the official kernels, but it can't be long now. This caused hangs when starting X Windows.
Both are solved. The first was a real problem. It caused the machine to not boot. The second was only a problem if you wanted really fast 3D speeds.
-Dave
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Just put together a new Athlon 750 and installed 256 MB. On its first boot, the machine didn't even make it to the BIOS. Found out the "OEM" 128 MB memory was defective. Like Emil, I found the NEC memory was good; thus far, I'm running on the single remaining NEC stick. Maybe Athlons just like NEC. I can't associate any problems with Linux. I'm running Win98 on one hard drive, and Linux on another (clean boots from each). They both like NEC memory. And now, so do I.
"Many have chosen to follow. They aren't the ones I'm worried about."
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This article is silly. Someone didn't do
enough research. Of course Linux works fine
on these machines. The issues are minor, with unsupported IDE controllers and AGP busses. If you want real support for the IDE controllers, use OpenBSD. It works flawlessly with AMD and VIA ide controllers.
Looks to me like it's mostly about getting a good quality MB for your system. I know a lot of people and small shops want to build a value system, and want to skimp on the motherboard with an AMD processor. Motherboard is one thing you never want to skimp on. I have the Epox 7KXA, and it works great. I have heard of people having problems with the lower quality motherboards, though. So, if you're going to build an Athlon system, do yourself a favor and go with a good board (personally, I'd recommend either the Epox 7KXA or the Asus K7M, but that's just me).
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
I have an Athlon 750 on an Abit KA7 MB dual booting win98 and red Hat 6.2 just fine. I had NO problems install or upgrading Linux on my box. I was sure that I was going to have to setup another box to install Linux on because of all of the hardware in my box. Linux had a few problems installing on 9 gig Atlas IV, but once I moved it from the third SCSI bus to the first it was happy. I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of the installation, the last time I installed Linux was in the 1.x.x kernel days. Other than the drive install problem I haven't had any problems at all.
I have had some troubles with my Athlon System. This was a flawless system with a Soyo 6BA+ and a PII-350. I just swaped in the Athlon chip and motherboard. First of all my computer hangs once in awhile during the SCSI BIOS init. Not a linux prob. Next, Whenever I did large disk operations the SCSI bus kept getting reset and my speed droped from 20MB/s to 10MB/s. By changeing from 2.2.14 to 2.2.15 and using append='mem=128m' those problems are gone. However, when I do a large untar (unrar, unzip, take your pick) the system seems to be almost locked up. It reminds me of times in winbloze when you wrote to a: and you have to wait. I niced the process to 20 (instead of 0) and it still hogs the system. Just not as bad. Anyone else having these problems? It sounds like some of the problems may be fixed in the 2.4 kernels.
Nope, sorry. The Athlon can do SMP (one of the benefits of a redesign -- and of using the EV6). The K6 cannot do SMP.
I've long looked at that pair of old K6-2/300 CPUs I have sitting left over and wished I could upgrade my MP3 server to an SMP box, but it's not to be. The K6-* chips can't handle SMP because of design limitations (and some patent hinkiness with Intel, if I recall correctly).
A better question is when will the Athlon do SMP? AMD would do well to court the Linux/smaller server crowd and hand us an SMP-able chipset that we can use. Since Intel seems to be having problems delivering just about everything they "release", one would think AMD would jump at the chance to steal some of the workgroup/small server market from them like they've done with the dektop. Guess they're just too busy. Darn shame, too. Best way to get me to buy another AMD chip isn't with a faster clock speed (600MHz is plenty fast, thanks), it's by tempting me with SMP. Hell, they release an SMP chipset, they'll sell me two chips at once! :-)
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
As the owner of an Athlon mobo (Asus K7M) and GeForce, I figured I would be through hell regarding the AGP. For those of you who don't know, there is an additional known hardware conflict between AGP on AMD Irongate-based chipset moherboards and the GeForce video cards.
I have had RH 6.1 installed (since Feb) and I have not noticed anything. I have run XF86 3.3.5 and XF86 4.0 and only have seen one distoted artifact. It is a half inch strip of pixel coloration across the top of my screen, which probably is a result of the hardware nVidia driver for XF86. It goes away when the grey X background and mouse come onto the screen.
I _did_ have AGP problems when running Q3A. The problem occured after playing Q3A for a while. The game would freeze up and begin repeating sound. I would have to reboot by telneting in from another machine (killing q3a only made the sound stop playing)
Fortunately nVidia includes an option in XF86 4.0 that you can add to your XF86Config file to disable AGP:
(put into your "Screen" section. this is also described in nVidia's FAQ for XF86 v4 installation)
Option "NvAgp" "0"
This will disable AGP under X at least for nvidia video cards running under XF86 v4.0. I would be anxious to know if this option helps/heleped out with any other AGP errors that might be presenting themselves to others...
- Sig
My Athlon 700 (upgraded from a 500) K7M rig works like a dream. I run linux as my primary OS and I haven't had a lick of trouble. The Athlon is an awesome chip and when people talk about compatablility troubles, it's probably just Intel FUD. There were some early problems with inadequate power supplies (these things can happen when the silicon contains 22 million transistors), but the they're pretty much gone now, due to better power supplies and AMD's conversion to the new .18 micron process. Bottom line: don't, don't, don't be scared out of buying an athlon because of linux compatability fears
Here is what dmesg says on 2.4.0-test1-ac5
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K L1 D Cache: 64K
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K
CPU: AMD-K7(tm) Processor stepping 02
Checking 386/387 coupling... OK, FPU using exception 16 error reporting.
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
mtrr: v1.36 (20000221) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Later on with AGP
installing Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 203M
agpgart: Detected AMD Irongate chipset
agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xe8000000
Both are definitly solved.
"think of it as evolution in action"
No way, compile IDE as a module and unmount and remove module from kernelspace and directory (last only if you have auto loading) that will solve it :) Although I'm still wondering what is the cure ? Maybe it's the 'boot from onboard first' option in the kernel somehow.
New things are always on the horizon
I recently upgraded from a K6-3/400 w/128M to a K7 700 w/256M (FIC SD11 mainboard) and with 2 exceptions, have had absolutely no problems.
Exception a) Red Hat 6.2 didn't autodetect the RAM size, although append="mem=256M" cleared that problem. Oddly though, while SETI had been running quite smoothly on the K6-3, it caused kernel panic in the K7. *shrug* too bad, it would have been fun to see how much time-per-unit changed.
-Mith
I have a:
FIC SD-11 mobo
Athlon 500
256mb ram
27.2Gb hd
Matrox G400 MAX
Linksys Etherfast 10/100
Hauppauge WinTv
Sb Live Value
I run linux as my primary operating system and all of my hardware works great. As some others noted agp requires a patch to get it working but other than that I have had absolutly no problems with it.
Got a K7-600 MHz that's been running fine AFAIK. But, OC, what the hell do I know...
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Dont be fooled! yes, you need to put 'APPEND="mem=256m" in lilo.conf, but then you ALSO need to run lilo on the command line in order for that setting to become active. Klilo will run lilo for you if you add the setting there and do a 'install' - but Klilo freaks on many distributions that put a listing for a floppy device boot option into lilo.conf... if you dont have a floppy mounted at the time you hit 'install' in Klilo, you'll get an error, and the new boot loader settings wont be used. /etc/lilo.conf with your favorite text editor (save a backup first) - and put 'APPEND="mem=256m"' on a new line in the listing for your default kernel, then save your changes, and just type 'lilo' on the command line.
for best results, edit
if lilo chokes, on a listing for a floppy boot kernel for example, try mounting a floppy, then running lilo... if it still chokes, you might have to remove the listing for the floppy boot option. (you can still overide this at the boot prompt if needbe to boot from whatever device you want)
I had many an issue with this when I first started playing with linux - and everyplace I looked skipped over the fact that you need to run lilo after configuring lilo.conf
Doh!
man is machine
These systems are really picky about memory. I went through two different Micron 128MB PC-100 modules before I insisted that the vendor send me NEC memory.
My Athlon 650 with a Biostar (Irongate) board works great with Red Hat 6.2. It does complain about an unrecognized IDE chipset, though.
I guess that a lot of these people who are complaining about Linux incompatibility really just have memory problems.
Both run RH 6.2, Corel and Mandrake quite well.
The only problem I'm experiencing is I have an Adaptec 2940U2W LVD, and 4 drives. I got tired of paying $900 for a 9G LVD drive, so I bought a Maxtor ATA66 IDE 20G drive to throw 'data'* (* pronounced 'MP3's') on.
Since my BIOS is set to boot from SCSI first, whenver I try to re-install Linux, it puts LILO on the IDE drive, and doesn't ask me which drive to put it on! I have to manually put LILO on the MBR of SDA.
Kinda defeats the easy, pretty installation process!
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
tcd004
Here's my Microsoft Parody, where's yours?
How come after having successfully installing Linux initially couldn't you perform the same basic kernel mods on Linux flavor X that SuSE did on theirs. Isn't that basically a jointly developed solution between SuSE and Athlon?
gcc does not optimize well for AMD chips at this point.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
my ABIT KA7 has problems with its Sound Blaster PCI 128. It locks up for a period of time and then comes back.
The guys in the Abit news group suggested enabling the "memory hole" in bios. This solved the problem for Windows, but slowed some Linux stuff down and took made the networking not work.
I did some digging in the Kernel development group and it looks like some high level people are on top of the problem, though.
For me, it's not the incompatibilities that matter. Heck, I run OpenBSD on a sparc, which is sure as hell incompatible with an Intel chip. And that's OK. I am, however, pissed that OpenBSD threads are *broken* on the sparc right now. But I can live with this, given the *BSD fixation with Intel. However, if this were an AMD chip, and I had to live with some piece of my OS not working on the Athlon because of their chipset, even though it is *supposedly* compatible with Intel, then I would be demanding a refund. Unless, of course, they provided the support necessary for fixing the problem.
And another report from the front: While my Athlon 700 / Asus K7M / 128M PC133 RAM setup performs flawlessly by itself (needs the append=128M parameter, though), things don't look so good after adding a nvidia TNT2 AGP card: weird errrors under Windows and X.
(The card is an "Apollo" from Joyimage, a crappy-looking Chinese manufacturer - but they do include Linux drivers on their CD-ROM)
Well it look I'm not the only one with these problems. Except that I actually had at least one real kernel crash (and countless X crashes, some of them requiring reboots) with the NVidia XFree4 driver.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I have an Athlon + K7m (1.04) with Km1009 BIOS and it's /very/ nearly stable. I test by repeated re-builds of the GNU compiler suite. 95% are consistent, some show glitches - some benign.
Now what worries me is that I get the same sort of thing on P II - 266, Ultra-Sparc/Solaris 2.5.1 and Sparc SunOS 4.1.3_U1 2.
I was planning to ask Slashdot about this, but it
takes time to collect the evidence with a fail rate this low.
Dear all, I'm now using my athlon 500 MHz since it was available in Europe. Some where in November 1999. My mainboard is a Biostar M7MKA, i've never had a crash or somthing that could not be explained. By the way kernel 2.3.x and the upcomming 2.4.x kernel wil be great as they are optimised for the Athlon. :-) By the way i'm using SUSE Linux 6.4 now. Before i used SUSE 6.3 See you, Joop. See this link for Linux hardware (database)
I've been running a K7/600 on a Gigabyte mobo (Irongate chipset) with few problems under Mandrake 6.5.
Problem #1 - Yes, I had to append my mem config under lilo. No biggie.
Problem #2 - Well, this has nothing to do with Linux, but my Pioneer DVD drive will reboot my system if used for > 1 minute at a time. Guess I'd better dig out the warranty card.
CorbinDallas
No, I don't mean Korben...
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
I've installed 6.4 on 4 PIII systems @ work. One dual system. No problem. And on a IDT, PI, K6 and Atlon system work all fine. By the way i don't like xosview at all. I prefer top or a plug in for windowmaker. KDE should also have one. By the way with top you can see wich process is causing the problem.
I hope it's any help to you.
See you,
Joop.
I have these running with 128 M RAM with Redhat 6.2 and slack 7.0 works like a charm
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
About a year ago, I decided I was going to build myself a computer and buy only top-quality parts. This is what I have in my box:
Athlon 750 (0.18 micron, mind you)
Asus K7M (Rev.4)
Asus V6800 GeForce 256 Pure
Tekram DC-390 U2W SCSI adapter
Sound Blaster Live! Value
(the rest is fairly insignificant)
I'm utterly thrilled with my machine, apart from the first week of ownership, I've had ZERO problems with the hardware itself. A word to those who buy up an old K7M mobo, though... DO FLASH A NEWER BIOS.
Everything works great in Linux too, except those pesky DRI GeForce drivers. Grr.
1ghz athlon, 256 meg, 32 meg GeForce.
It has worked flawlessly for 1 month using kernels 2.2.14, 2.2.15, and since its release 2.3.99pre9.
Only minor discomfort is that I had to specify append="mem=256m" to get the kernel to recognize above 64meg
It has been running at udma66 for a week with no known problems.
MHO is that the article is about an 80% honest perception of reality. The other 20% could likely be attributed to needing content to publish.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
AMD Athlon 650MHz
;-( Both distros would freeze at random points during the install or segfault even in text mode. Then I saw the light and it was called SuSE 6.4 - installed and detected everything the very first time.
;-)
Biostar M7MKA mobo
First I tried Mandrake 7.0 and RedHat 6.2 - it was pityful... I spend the whole week pulling my hair and running memory and "hardware exclusion" tests - including installing Win98...
I guess German engineering rules not only in cars!
So far my gripes are with Netscape and KDE/Qt. I'm not sure it's Athlon-related, but these crash disproportionately often - even compared to my SUN Ultra 5 box
.
I have an Fic SD-11 and a K7 running at 550 Mhz. I purchased it last November. It has run Redhat 6.1 and 6.2 with no problems. I have only run 2.2.X kernels on it (2.2.15 currently). It is pretty fast and runs excellent under linux.
... of preconfigured Linux boxes, we've had excellent results with the Asus K7M and K7V and the old MSI 6167. The MSI 6195 didn't seem to work, but it could have been just a defective board.
-- Rod
http://www.sunsetsystems.com/