Re: athlon kernel problems and taroon

[Tom Diehl <tdiehl rogueind com>]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2003, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Sat, 2 Aug 2003, Tom Diehl wrote:
> 
> > A while back I saw a posting that the athlon kernel and athlon systems
> > do not play well together. In fact I see numerous segfaults when I
> > install the athlon kernel.
> 
> Userspace segfaults or kernel oopses ?

It says something like "taroon kernel: SEGFAULT" and then a bunch of trace
stuff that even says --------------CUT HERE--------------

I am doing the above from memory. One time it even confused the filesystems.
The machine dropped to single user mode and fsck would not run.

If it is useful I can try it again. the data on the machine is expendable.
Kickstart is a wonderful thing. :-) Before we both go to a lot of unnecessary
trouble this is definately NOT a server class machine. It is a desktop machine
that I use for testing. If you find another data point useful I will try to
get you any useful info I can. It is your call.

> If you're seeing kernel oopses, those appear to be due to some
> Athlon chips faulting on prefetch(NULL) even though prefetch is
> defined to never fault.
> 
> Also, it only faults under some circumstances, which we haven't
> quite pinned down yet and only only on some Athlon steppings
> (we haven't exactly pinned down this either).  The kernels in
> the Taroon up2date channel have a workaround.

Ok, but if I can only run the i686 kernel how do I coax up2date into giving
me the up2dated athlon kernel? when I goto rhn it does not offer me an updated
kernel. Is there somewhere else I can get the athlon kernel??

-- 
......Tom		Registered Linux User #14522	http://counter.li.org
tdiehl rogueind com	My current SpamTrap ------->	mtd123 rogueind com