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?"

Comments

ASUS K7V -- Linux Tested & Certified

[nd]

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.

2 cents..

[John Fulmer]

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

Re:K6 can't do SMP, Athlon can

[fsck]

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.

Athlon Problems Explained

[drig]

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

Re:AGP problems

[chainsaw1]

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...