Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Felix von Leitner]

Hi!

I have now had two MSI mainboards and two Athlons with 1330 MHz, and
none of them works as advertised.  When I compile an Athlon kernel (I
previously had an Athlon 900 with an Epox board, which was flaky and did
not boot reliably and the USB subsystem was unreliable, too), the
resulting kernel will boot only partially, get spurious errors like a
divide error in the reiserfs code trying to mount a reiserfs volume, and
finally panic on me because it tried to kill the swapper.

When I compile the same kernel for Pentium Pro, it works.  How can this
be?

This is not my only problem with this combination, though.  My network
card (tulip) only works in two of the six PCI slots, my 1995 NCR SCSI
controller only works two slots, and there is only one slot combination
with my sound card that actually works.  When I start Windoze on the
hardware, it hangs trying to load drivers for the NCR controller.

Since this is now my second MSI board, my second power supply, my second
Athlon and there appear to be no thermal problems (judging from the
BIOS health display), I am out of guesses here.  I basically replaces
everything in my PC and it still won't work.

Felix

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 06:02:01PM +0200, Felix von Leitner wrote:
> I have now had two MSI mainboards and two Athlons with 1330 MHz, and
> none of them works as advertised.  When I compile an Athlon kernel (I

VIA chipset..

> When I compile the same kernel for Pentium Pro, it works.  How can this
> be?

Theory right now: Because the Athlon kernel does streaming memory copies at
full bus performance. Not all VIA chipset boards seem to cope.

I'd be interested to know if 2.4.6-ac5 Athlon optimised works on your board.
The reason for this is that it contains the official VIA fixes for their IDE
corruption problem rather than our own.

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Dan Hollis]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 06:02:01PM +0200, Felix von Leitner wrote:
> > When I compile the same kernel for Pentium Pro, it works.  How can this
> > be?
> Theory right now: Because the Athlon kernel does streaming memory copies at
> full bus performance. Not all VIA chipset boards seem to cope.

I fixed my MSI/athlon stability problems by reducing PS load. My next
purchase will be a 450W PS to replace my 300W.

Athlons are real power suckers, 300W is probably 'barely enough' for
typical PC.

-Dan

-- 
[-] Omae no subete no kichi wa ore no mono da. [-]

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Miloslaw Smyk]

Dan Hollis wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 23 Jul 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 06:02:01PM +0200, Felix von Leitner wrote:
> > > When I compile the same kernel for Pentium Pro, it works.  How can this
> > > be?
> > Theory right now: Because the Athlon kernel does streaming memory copies at
> > full bus performance. Not all VIA chipset boards seem to cope.
> 
> I fixed my MSI/athlon stability problems by reducing PS load. My next
> purchase will be a 450W PS to replace my 300W.
> 
> Athlons are real power suckers, 300W is probably 'barely enough' for
> typical PC.

I'd rather say it may be related to how your MSI board supplies power to the
Athlon, rather than the Athlon itself. I've been using ABit KT7A +
Athlon@1.1GHz for half a year now, without a _single_ stability problem -
and this machine is my primary workstation, being switched off basically
only when I sleep.

I have Matrox G400/YMF724/NIC/CDR/DVD/three HDs (two in RAID) and... 250W
PS.

A friend has purchased basically the same config, he has one HD less but his
CPU is overclocked to 1150MHz. He uses both Linux and Windows and also does
not report any problems.

cheers,
Milek
Ps. One probably important thing is that I'm only using HPT370 IDE
controller under Linux.
-- 
mailto:thorgal@amiga.com.pl   |  "Man in the Moon and other weird things" -
http://wfmh.org.pl/~thorgal/  |  see it at http://wfmh.org.pl/~thorgal/Moon/
         Fight for the good cause: http://www.laubzega.com/dvd/

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Gerbrand van der Zouw]

Hi,

Alan Cox wrote:

> I'd be interested to know if 2.4.6-ac5 Athlon optimised works on your board.
> The reason for this is that it contains the official VIA fixes for their IDE
> corruption problem rather than our own.

I have a MSI K7T Turbo (MS-6330) mobo (VIA-KT133A chipset) and had a go 
with the 2.4.6-ac5 kernel with Athlon optimisations on. The overall 
impression is that the combination is slightly more stable than kernels 
without the Southbridge fix. I.e. I now manage to boot in single user 
mode, however running anything as advanced as gcc is out of the 
question: oopses all over the place and also some complaints from the 
VM-system.

I am in no way qualified enough to go hacking around in the kernel 
myself, but am quite willing to test any patches that might help towards 
solving the problem.

Cheers,

Gerbrand van der Zouw

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[jury gerold]

If you have PC100 SDRAM try to replace it with PC133.
This worked for my motherboard. (Gigabyte GA-7ZXR, VIA-KT133A, Athlon 
1.1MHz)

Cheers too

Gerold

Gerbrand van der Zouw wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Alan Cox wrote:
>
>> I'd be interested to know if 2.4.6-ac5 Athlon optimised works on your 
>> board.
>> The reason for this is that it contains the official VIA fixes for 
>> their IDE
>> corruption problem rather than our own.
>
>
> I have a MSI K7T Turbo (MS-6330) mobo (VIA-KT133A chipset) and had a 
> go with the 2.4.6-ac5 kernel with Athlon optimisations on. The overall 
> impression is that the combination is slightly more stable than 
> kernels without the Southbridge fix. I.e. I now manage to boot in 
> single user mode, however running anything as advanced as gcc is out 
> of the question: oopses all over the place and also some complaints 
> from the VM-system.
>
> I am in no way qualified enough to go hacking around in the kernel 
> myself, but am quite willing to test any patches that might help 
> towards solving the problem.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gerbrand van der Zouw
>

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Mark Hahn]

> If you have PC100 SDRAM try to replace it with PC133.

ugh, this is the same (mistaken) approach as turning off CONFIG_MK7:
cripple performance enough that your system works.  turning off 
CONFIG_MK7 disables Arjan's nice code in mmx.c which delivers 
2-4x the copy/zero-page bandwidth...

there *are* stable via/athlon systems, and that indicates that the 
problem is not inherent to the chipset.  I have a gigabyte ga-7zx,
duron/600, pc133 system that has always been rock-solid.  and I 
recently built an Asus a7v-133, tbird/1199, pc133 system that is
also entirely stable.  both run cas2 pc133, CONFIG_MK7 kernels, etc.
both have fairly generous power supplies.

so far, the only plausible theory is that some individual factor(s)
(MB, bios settings, power quality, dram quality, etc) causes 
the instability that some people report.

regards, mark hahn.

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[gjury]

I did not say chipset at all.
You seem to miss the fact, that >= 40 % of the SDRAM modules are not 
even close to the spec.
The german magazin ct can sing a song about it. http://www.heise.de/ct
Software has nothing to do with this.
The windows installation on my PC suffert from the same effects.
It was just harder to spot there below ... .
Every memory tester i tried was showing no problems at all.
It may be triggered more likely or not, but bad SDRAM cannot be fixed in 
software.
Thats my own only plausible theory.

regards
gerold

Mark Hahn wrote:

>>If you have PC100 SDRAM try to replace it with PC133.
>>
>
>ugh, this is the same (mistaken) approach as turning off CONFIG_MK7:
>cripple performance enough that your system works.  turning off 
>CONFIG_MK7 disables Arjan's nice code in mmx.c which delivers 
>2-4x the copy/zero-page bandwidth...
>
>there *are* stable via/athlon systems, and that indicates that the 
>problem is not inherent to the chipset.  I have a gigabyte ga-7zx,
>duron/600, pc133 system that has always been rock-solid.  and I 
>recently built an Asus a7v-133, tbird/1199, pc133 system that is
>also entirely stable.  both run cas2 pc133, CONFIG_MK7 kernels, etc.
>both have fairly generous power supplies.
>
>so far, the only plausible theory is that some individual factor(s)
>(MB, bios settings, power quality, dram quality, etc) causes 
>the instability that some people report.
>
>regards, mark hahn.
>

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Mike Frisch]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 10:59:56AM +0200, gjury wrote:
> You seem to miss the fact, that >= 40 % of the SDRAM modules are not 
> even close to the spec.

There's something to be said for sticking with brand name memory or at
least memory from reputable vendors...

Re: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Mike Frisch]

On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 02:35:07PM -0700, Manuel A. McLure wrote:
> Let me add my voice to the crowd. I have the same MSI K7T Turbo with an
> Athlon TBird 900MHz and 256M of PC133 SDRAM, and kernel 2.4.6 runs
> rock-stable on it. However, 2.4.7 hangs hard after a day or so of uptime -
> no response to pings, can't switch from X to a virtual console, etc. Sysrq-B
> will reboot, but other Sysrq-keys (like Sysrq-S or Sysrq-U) don't seem to
> work. Unfortunately I am invariably in X when this happens so I don't get to
> see ant OOPS text, and there is no OOPS information in the system log after
> the reboot.

I do not know if this is related since it seems to be VIA-based boards
being mentioned here, but I am also experiencing hard lockups on
Athlon-optimized 2.4.7 (and 2.4.7-ac?).  My board is an ASUS A7A266 (ALi
MaGik chipset), Micro PC2100 DDR RAM, and an Athlon T-Bird 1.2GHz.

RE: Athlon/MSI mobo combo broken?

[Manuel A. McLure]

> so far, the only plausible theory is that some individual factor(s)
> (MB, bios settings, power quality, dram quality, etc) causes 
> the instability that some people report.
 

Let me add my voice to the crowd. I have the same MSI K7T Turbo with an
Athlon TBird 900MHz and 256M of PC133 SDRAM, and kernel 2.4.6 runs
rock-stable on it. However, 2.4.7 hangs hard after a day or so of uptime -
no response to pings, can't switch from X to a virtual console, etc. Sysrq-B
will reboot, but other Sysrq-keys (like Sysrq-S or Sysrq-U) don't seem to
work. Unfortunately I am invariably in X when this happens so I don't get to
see ant OOPS text, and there is no OOPS information in the system log after
the reboot.

--
Manuel A. McLure - Unify Corp. Technical Support <mmt@unify.com>
Zathras is used to being beast of burden to other peoples needs. Very sad
life. Probably have very sad death, but at least there is symmetry.