Athlon chips with linux

danny678010 · 10-11-2002, 03:15 AM

I'm new to linux, I've tried on a couple of occasions to install linux on my machine (k7s5a m/board, cheap ati radeon graphics, AMD 1700xp processor) with little sucess, system freezing, random stuff failing to load at boot (different stuff every time), some stuff failing to shut down (again totally random). I managed to get it working for the first time last night after finding out from redhat.com that some AMD Athlon processors cannot use 4mb page files for memory allocation (as Intel processors have since the release of the pentium and so linux will try to use by default), lots of Athlons are affected by this especially the faster ones. The remedy appears to be to force linux to revert back to using 4kb page files by sending the kernel the mem=nopentium option at boot time.
What then are the knock on effects of using 4kb instead of 4mb page files, would this impair the performance of my chip in comparison to unaffected batches of the chip?
Do I need to take the chip back?

Thymox · 10-11-2002, 07:42 AM

http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php

Edward78 · 10-11-2002, 11:35 AM

I have the same board, but I have SuSE Linux 8.0 & it works fine.

adam_boz · 10-11-2002, 02:34 PM

You probably need to enable a different processor for the kernel. I think that the default is a pentium 3.... but I don't really know what yours uses.

EDIT:

sorry, I didnt' read your whole question. I don't know anything about the memory stuff you're talking about... so the only thing I can say would be to change the processor (as stated above). If you want to send that message to the kernel at boot (I can't remember what it is) put a line like this in /etc/lilo.conf

append="processor=nopentium"

I THINK that's what they're talking about...

jtshaw · 10-11-2002, 04:42 PM

If you get a distro that defaults to the 386 (which is perhaps the safest way to default anyway, since things weren't always created equal after that) you should be fine. Then just recompile your kernel with support for the Athlon. I run linux on a lot of high speed Athlons and I have never had any issues with any of them not working because of any memory errors, but I have always run Slackware which defaults to a 386 kernel to begin with, like all distributions probably should.

adas · 10-12-2002, 10:20 AM

Athlon works fine with my Mandrake.
No crashes or freezes yet.
It's 1,4 ghz, btw.

mace · 10-12-2002, 01:21 PM

ive installed debian woody and pot. - redhat 6-7.2 - mandrake (two versions) - suse 8.0 on my athlon box