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Major Linux/Athlon CPU bug discovered
GeorgeFrancisco writes "I recently installed the nVidia drivers so I could play TuxRacer on my Athlon. Problem is it kept inexplicably hanging Linux. Now I know why. The CPU bug affects Athlon/Duron/Athlon MP AGP users. Fortunately there's a way around it, and: "Alan [Cox] is going to try to add some kind of Athlon/AGP CPU bug detection code to the kernel so that it will be able to auto-downgrade to 4K pages when necessary." Read more on the Gentoo Linux site."
The repetition of the elegant, almost minimalistic mantra, "fp," brings a warm, subtle shade of meaning to this first post. Truly a masterful work by a brilliant though little known artist. It seems a hot new contender for best original Slashdot content, a category previously dominated by the broad, mellow flavor of the goatse.cx link.
Instead of saying "oops, there a hardware bug", they said, "oops, here' a patch for w2k". Looks like none of the kernel developers knew they had to look a w2k bug fixes to find out about hardware bugs.
Boycott AMD!!!
--Metrollica
I don't know why those damn Linux developers just didn't fire up good ol' /sbin/regedit and fix the Linux registry.
Oh my God, AMD makes you read a 7000-character licensing agreement in order to download a 334 byte patch. And people think the GPL is bad ...
MShaft: "Not-a-bug-it's-a-feature"
Intel: "Not a bug it's erratum."
VIA: "We slowed it down to keep it cool."
Nvidia: "That was a leak! We are not doing public driver beta testing!"
ATI "Who the hell plays Quack3?"
AMD "the patch is here"
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
...seems they work for Intel. Their description was:
"It's a major bug. We don't know how it happend. We will ask marketing. We don't remember ever sell that chip.".
:-))
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
None of the Athlons or Durons I've built have had any problems with Tux Racer (Mostly on Man8.1 default install).
My nephew spends hours Sliding that little penguin arround with that bloody elevator music going, & not once has there been a freeze or lockup, much to my dissapointment.
From AMD's website:
Note: This patch is not needed for Windows XP
Here's the stark truth for you: 1)Money, 2)Userbase.
Remember when Corporate Enemy #1 was singing something to the tune of, "Whenever there's a problem, you don't know who to blame?", and how The Community laughed it all off as FUD? Now you can see that whenever there's a problem, you don't necessarily know who to notify, either. Don't call it a feature one day and then curse it the next. That sounds all too much like somebody else...
Apparently, if you'd believe the Linux community, you'd be hard-pressed upon where to place the blame. You see, the Linuxist Manifesto's number one rule is to lie to protect the best interests of Linux. No self-respectable Linux zealot would insult or place blame upon AMD, because AMD's philosophy centers around tackling American Corporations with their Asian sweatshops, selling their chips at bargain-basement prices like the Red Menace Commies do with their Wal-Mart shit.
So, right about now, you're probably thinking that the zealots are clearly in a dilemma. Who are they going to blame? If you have a prediction before I tell you, the poll is on the right. Or maybe the left. Either way, take your pick.
You'd think that the parasitic community would place blame upon Microsoft, right? Alas, Microsoft has had the bug patched since September 2000. Not only that, Windows XP , the latest in the suite of high-powered, stable operating systems from Microsoft Corp., has this patch built in. That's right, built in. Keep in mind that Windows XP was released in October 2001, over three months ago. Meanwhile, no one knows what the hell Alan Cocks has been doing since then, since he hides under the cloak of secrecy. nVidia has been informing users via tech support, even to the Linux community, how to fix the problem for months now. Clearly the blame is upon Alan Cocks's shoulder, but to place the blame where it is rightfully justified is inexcusable in the Linux community. The drones are in disarray.
The actual bug occurs when Linux users contract the Tux Racer virus via KEmail. When first run, Tux Racer enables a feature in your third-world sweatshop AMD processor called "extended paging." Now, I know you're probably thinking that this sounds like some sort of Nokia feature. Well, you're wrong. It's yet another feature that AMD illegally hacked from Intel. It allows your browser to seamlessly view pages up to 4Mb in size. Before its introduction in the early days of the Intel Pentium processor, web pages were broken up into 4K segments, because any pages larger would freeze the computer. That's why Microsoft didn't invent Javascript until after the Pentium, every time they went to use it, their pages exceeded 4K, and henceforth froze the computer. Intel came to the rescue with the Pentium line of chips, and, as usual, AMD got out their super high tech Asian hacking tools and "reverse-engineered" (code-name for 'illegally hacked') Intel's technology. Thus, users of the inferior AMD Cyrix Kx86-2 Now! processor could also view large web pages without crashing. So why did no one notice that pages larger than 4K would crash AMD processors? Well, Microsoft has had a fix for 16 months, like we mentioned earlier. But why did no one from the Linux community notice? Well, apparently, there does not exist a page devoted to Linux that is more than 4K in size. Since most of the Linux installations out there denounce color as 'feature bloat,' all Linux pages follow an unwritten oath to suck. Believe me, they all do.
So, for the good of Linux, you may now disperse. Head off to various tech sites and continue blaming Microsoft for not telling you sooner. Your community will thank you.