Hi there,

I installed CentOS 4.4 x86_64 on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and the installation happened successfully. However, when it boots up I get this terrible error with a bunch of text that starts with something about "badness" and the GUI never comes up.

All I did was boot to the CD's, remove all partitions and had it make the new partitions for me, choose everything for the install, nothing special!

So I installed i386 instead and it works fine. I wish I could get the x86_64 to work though, any ideas?

Out of curiosity what would you do with the x86_64 vs the i386 version? What advantage are you looking to gain? I'm not trying to discourage you but I mean I'm just curious since I don't see a real advantage unless you're taking advantage of the improved memory or the mathematical advantage.

I have also recently installed Centos 4.4_x86_64 on a box with the AMD Athlon 64 x64 4200+. The motherboard is a GA-M57SLI-S4 from Gigabyte, with Nvidia Nforce 570. I have been unable to boot the dual-core (smp) kernel. Under default settings, the screen displays "Booting the kernel," and then it just hangs forever, requiring a hard power-down. The single processor kernel will boot, but even then there is about a 50% chance that eth0 and network services will fail.

What I've done so far is to load third party drivers from Nvidia at and used the updated drivers meant for Red Hat 4 Update 4, which should be like Centos 4.4.

This _seemed_ to fix the eth0 problem, although, as I said, it already worked intermittently. Still no joy on the dual-core boot. I am trying to figure out now if I need an updated kernel; the CentOS is 2.6.9, and I know there are some that are 2.6.16 and higher available.

Sorry, the site for those Nvidia drivers is

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.21.html

I have the same issue with: GA-M59LSI-S5-F7 (nForce 590), Athlon X2 5200. Installation goes great, but can only boot single processor. The network worked out of the box so running up2date went okay...kernel updated to latest available from CentOS. Still hangs before "Nash" starts.

I'll try 2.6.18+ ASAP to see if it helps, and/or FC6.

I'm also having issues getting dual-head monitors to work, using the GUI config for gnome. The config seems to ignore any changes to the dual head tab, and won't "write xorg.conf" when "OK" is pressed...just hangs. I plan on manual editing after some research.

FreeBSD 6.2-REL SMP runs without issue...very quick "buildworld". The nvidia/marvell onboard nics aren't recognized, though, since FBSD is topping out at nForce 4 onboard nics. Trying ZyXEL GBE adapters soon.

I'll repost if successful.
-s


QUOTE=davelant]I have also recently installed Centos 4.4_x86_64 on a box with the AMD Athlon 64 x64 4200+. The motherboard is a GA-M57SLI-S4 from Gigabyte, with Nvidia Nforce 570. I have been unable to boot the dual-core (smp) kernel. Under default settings, the screen displays "Booting the kernel," and then it just hangs forever, requiring a hard power-down. The single processor kernel will boot, but even then there is about a 50% chance that eth0 and network services will fail.

What I've done so far is to load third party drivers from Nvidia at and used the updated drivers meant for Red Hat 4 Update 4, which should be like Centos 4.4.

This _seemed_ to fix the eth0 problem, although, as I said, it already worked intermittently. Still no joy on the dual-core boot. I am trying to figure out now if I need an updated kernel; the CentOS is 2.6.9, and I know there are some that are 2.6.16 and higher available.[/QUOTE]

So far, the only way I've found to boot up the smp kernel is to use the "noapic" parameter. I went so far as to download FC6, but the installer's kernel hangs up before the installation could even start, so I decided for now to live with my "noapic" solution.

I can't find the reference at the moment, but that "noapic" fix comes from the Red Hat documentation; it's a known issue with the Nvidia chipset.

I came across this when I tried to load Ubuntu on my NVidia 590 chipset board and AMD dual core 4600 cpu Using the noapic switch enabled a successful installation.

As an aside, does anyone know which kernel is required to identify/run the above components? I tried SUSE 9.3 as I had a copy, but this wouldn't load - presumably due to the dual core CPU not being recognised. I'm a linux newbie and want to try a few distros out before settling on a favourite, so knowing which kernel I need would help me to narrow the options down a bit!

Thanks,

The "noapic" option works on boot with FC6 for me. When the installer CD boots, type "linux noapic" and the installer should boot okay. (You might've already tried this.) From there, it should be good to go. FC6 recognizes both cores and runs fine so far...more testing this weekend.