Athlon Bugs in Linux 2.2?

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?"

Comments

MTRR

[retep]

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!

MTRR support

[Inoshiro]

Alan Cox (in his daily log) talked about fixing K7 support when his Athlon arrived.

(August 19th entry from this 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 :-)
---