Sorry if you've already read this from the Linux - General forum.
I'm new to linux, I've tried on a couple of occasions to install red hat 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?

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

You've read them? You should have! Please don't double post... and you've blatently admitted it in your 1st line! Your question is likely to get answered, but possibly not straight away.

Dead helpfull that Thymox thanks alot.

Thanks for the link rshaw, if i'm getting the right end of the stick AMD are shirking responsibility for the instability back onto Linux? I can see a vicious circle forming !

That's really bizzare. My Athlon 2000+ runs like a champ with my old RIVA TNT2 Ultra card.

Post your specs. Got Raid? Multiple CD/DVD?

I think that's load of crap about AMD's not running well on Linux. I've run Redhat 7.0 -8.0, Mandrake 8.0-9.0, SUSE 8.0, and Libranet 2.7 on overclocked Athlon 1.33ghz w/ no problems what so ever. I think the majority of people on this board who built their own systems run AMD.

yeppers, i have debian woody and SID on this as well as mandrake 8.2 before, that reminds i gotta go install mandarke.

i've never had any trouble either, but i'm not using my agp slot. it won't be a problem for much longer, the patch went in the 2.4.20-pre9 kernel. so you can run =nopentium until 2.4.20-final, or patch your kernel.

Been using my AGP slot since day 1. Now if someone can help me with my mouse problems.

The bug as far as I remember it was very Athlon T-bird specific, and I got hit by it, but it was much more subtle, and usually only got me when I was kicking X in the head by having open like 160+ pictures in the Gimp or something.

Most likely something else is dodgy. Like the other dude said, what's the specs? Funky PCI ATA riser card? DMA timeouts on a cheap Yamaha card that locks the whole machine? There's a lot of funkiness that usually is a matter of one little thing? Check out the output of "dmesg" and see if there's some hardware chaos.

Cheers,

Finegan

i loaded linux 10+ times, each with a diff problem upon trying to boot. finally, i re-burned the CD and it has worked beautifully ever since. the iso had a good CRC and no errors reported upon burning it even though it was worthless (yahama 8424S burner). maybe worth a try.

Full spec of my machine is as follows:
Elite K7S5A motherboard (o/b sound does't work yet)
256Mb SDRAM
64Mb ATI Radeon graphics (32Mb shared)
DVD rom
HP 4x CDRW
40Gb Hda1 (still windows sorry)
2.5Gb Hdb1 (Red Hat 7.2 with all automatic updates)

Talk to your LUG about this particular setup and how big the speed impact is. Go to www.linux.org.

I'm not sure what this page file is. For NT/2k, it's a swap file. But Linux has its own swap partition.