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Tracking Down The AMD "Processor Bug"

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the complex-causes dept.

tercero writes: "over at the Gentoo Linux website there is an update on the AMD processor bug mentioned here. The sum up is that AMD claims it's not a bug with the Athlon processor, but with the motherboard. More detailed information can be found on this LKML post." An Anonymous Coward points to a similar explanation at Linux Weekly News. Update: 01/25 01:25 GMT by T : Daniel Robbins from Gentoo clarifies: "AMD is not calling this a 'motherboard' issue, it is an interaction between a feature of the Athlon called 'speculative writes' and the design of the GART, which is not cache-coherent. It's a 'Athlon/cache coherency/GART' problem, not a 'motherboard' problem."

2 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. although i SHOULD mention... by Narcocide · · Score: 0, Troll

    although i SHOULD mention that until VERY recently one of those boxes that happened also to be using an Aureal Vortex 2 soundcard (good soundcard... damn shame about the company) was experiencing lockups on sound play until someone discovered that you have to run this line:

    /sbin/setpci -d '12eb:*' 40.B=ff

    before using the soundcard in order to keep athalon systems with aureal vortex-based soundcards from locking up.

    frankly, i'm not even sure what the hell that line
    does, it's magic. i don't even know how you'd go
    about figuring something like that out, but at least now i can use my soundcard in linux... damn shame about windows. heh.

  2. I'm wondering if this issue is related by cecil36 · · Score: 2, Troll
    I'm running M$ Windoze on an Athlon 750. I noticed that the system crashes on a few occasions. Specific incidents where a crash can be predicted is when I
    • Play Diablo II on Battle.net. The crash occurs when I try to join an Open game after leaving another Open game.
    • Run M$ Word for an extended period of time. The crash comes when I scroll through a large document or paste a lot of text or images from another source.

    I also noticed that as I run programs, not all the memory used by the program is freed when the program terminates. I ran the System Monitor and it revealed to me this information. I'm not sure if this is Athlon or Windoze related. Anyways, I'm suspecting that the problem may not be limited to Linux boxes.