I have posted this question as a reply, but it seems to be lost.

Pardon me if this is against the forum's rules.


I have always used arc i386 on three of my linux servers. The fourth one is an Athlon. Again, I installed 386 on it. But it seems to crash often, while the others don't. The other servers experience little load, but this Athlon is the main server.

I also upgraded it to kernel 2.4.18-19.8.0, and it crashes even when I compile (amanda) using a normal account. Syslog spits out "Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address ..."

Does anyone know if I can use 386 on Athlon? and if so, has anyone experienced it??

thank you all.

I guess you're question is if you can use binaries compiled for i386 on AMD? sure you can, but it would be better to use 686 binaries and for the kernel part: there's an option you can set if you're using AMD CPU's (processor types & features)

The disappointing thing is that I can compile Amanda on a P II 700 MHz, and on a P I?? 200 MHz, run Amanda and able to back up ~10 GIG.
But on the Athlon 1.5 GHz, compiling crashes it almost every time until the last time (which I hurrily tar'ed it for later installations). Running tar and gzip (by Amanda) would just freeze the machine. This does not make sense with its power.

Well, it's kinda hard to say what's going on, but I'm almost sure that it crashes because of the i386 binaries. Try using i686 or even do athlon binaries to get the most performance out of your system. I don't see why i386 bins wouldn't work, but if it is crashing, try something else more suited for your system.

As it is the main file system server, it is not that quick and easy to reinstall it. Moreover, I just reinstalled it after a disk failure within 2 months ago.

But I will try to install i686 if I get my boss' confirmation. It will probably take time.

Any other comments are still welcome.

Thanks for your replies.

You may have hardware problem, and or your software need some update/upgrade.

Tell us more detail on your hardware e.g. motherboard name/maker, video card, etc.

And tell us what is your distro, version, etc.


Have more fun

Sure, I will peek into its hardware description once I get back to the office. It's my days off, and of course I don't get paid for working extra at home



Have a good weekend everyone

How do you choose how the kernel is compiled. I used my default settings when recompiling my slack kernel, and it made it i486, but ive got a P4 2.0Ghz. What settings do I have to change?

Meaning: look in the "processor types & features" section

I don't know about other distributions, but for Linux, when you download the src rpm, it says, i.e., kernel-source-2.4.18-19.8.0.i386.rpm or some similar variants. Isn't it the same for Slackware???

Slackers have to compile the kernel from www.kernel.org themselves.

Well, Slackware has a pre patched Kernel that I use, but yeah, its from Source. I had never thought that it wouldnt automatically choose i686, because GCC always chooses i686 automatically.

Hi Aherm,

Here's the hardware info:
>uname -a
Linux server 2.4.18-19.8.0 #1 Thu Dec 12 04:58:36 EST 2002 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

(RH 8.0 kernel binary upgrade i386)

Filesystem: ext3
Video card: nVidia Corporation NV11 (GeForce2 MX) 64 MB
Mem: 512 MB
CPU model: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+ stepping 2
CPU speed: 1535.233 MHz
Cache size: 256 KB
Bogomips: 3060.53
Motherboard: ABIT KG7 AMD 761

(This is from ABIT website)

AGP 4X
AGP 2.0 4X spec support high performance graphic process purpose and at a peak bandwidth of 1GB/s.

DDR200/266
Supports up to 2GB of un-buffered DDR200/266 and 3.5GB of registered DDR200/266

ABIT SoftMenu™
The overclocking function includes CPU frequency, Vcore, multiplier, chipset & DDR voltage and AGP VDDQ voltage adjustment available to maximize your system performance.

RAID 0/1/0+1 (For RAID only)
Supports the most advanced ATA100 HDDs with RAID 0/1/0+1 onboard HPT370 RAID controller enables enhanced functionality and HDDs performance without the cost of additional add-on cards


If there's anything else you need, please let me know.

The problem is not in the i386 binaries, Athlon has no problem with that. Usually this kind of problem is hardware related, with RAM as your usual suspect no. 1.

Is there any way to check it ?? i.e., bad RAM

I have saved a copy of syslog at the time of crash, a list of modules loaded (hopefully every of them), and run ksymoops
over them, but I don't know how to interpret it.

Do you know how to??