Motherboard A7M2666-D

Motherboard A7M2666-D

[Gerald]

HI All,

  I solve a problem on my asus board last week, i was thinking this info 
would be interresting for you :-) .

I brought an asus motherboard : A7M266-D : Dual Socket A - AMD 762 
Chipset DDR SDRAM.

The board i've got was in bios realase 1004 from december 2001...

When i try to compile the linux kernel for my athlon smp server it hang 
always when trying to initialize apic stuff.

The problem was that my server hasn't an diskdrive to upgrade the bios !
I try kernel from 2.4.18 to the new one 2.4.20 all didn't works with my 
bios realase 1004.

So i download from the asus website the october bios release 1009.
And I burn a boot cd with the executable from a dos boot floppy, the 
aflash.exe and the bios just downloaded.

Since last week with this bios release,  all is going fine ....  

SO DON'T TRY TO USE LINUX IN SMP MODE WHILE HAVING AN BIOS RELEASE 1004.

Cheers,

Re: Motherboard A7M2666-D

[Bill Davidsen]

On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Gerald wrote:

>   I solve a problem on my asus board last week, i was thinking this info 
> would be interresting for you :-) .

Yes, thanks for the warning/information.

> I brought an asus motherboard : A7M266-D : Dual Socket A - AMD 762 
> Chipset DDR SDRAM.
> 
> The board i've got was in bios realase 1004 from december 2001...
> 
> When i try to compile the linux kernel for my athlon smp server it hang 
> always when trying to initialize apic stuff.
> 
> The problem was that my server hasn't an diskdrive to upgrade the bios !
> I try kernel from 2.4.18 to the new one 2.4.20 all didn't works with my 
> bios realase 1004.
> 
> So i download from the asus website the october bios release 1009.
> And I burn a boot cd with the executable from a dos boot floppy, the 
> aflash.exe and the bios just downloaded.
> 
> Since last week with this bios release,  all is going fine ....  
> 
> SO DON'T TRY TO USE LINUX IN SMP MODE WHILE HAVING AN BIOS RELEASE 1004.

I'm happy that you solved you problem, but I would have suggested trying
to boot SMP with the "noapic" option, just to see if the problem was more
easily solved.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.

Re: Motherboard A7M2666-D

[Alan Cox]

> Since last week with this bios release,  all is going fine ....  
> 
> SO DON'T TRY TO USE LINUX IN SMP MODE WHILE HAVING AN BIOS RELEASE 1004.

Or you can set the 1004 BIOS to MP 1.1 not MP 1.4 and it'll work if you
don't want to flash a new bios

Re: Motherboard A7M2666-D

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 18:46, Gerald wrote:
> I have one question ? How can test that's the apm functionality of this 
> board is working correctly ...

APM isnt defined for SMP systems. 2.4.20-ac has a native power managment
module for the 266-D - saves about 90W when idle

Re: Motherboard A7M2666-D

[Thomas Steinbrecher]

Greetings,

we encountered the same problems, also with an A7M266.

> So i download from the asus website the october bios
> release 1009.

We found that it boots fine from bios revision 1006 on.

> suggested trying
> to boot SMP with the "noapic" option, just to see if the
> problem was more
> easily solved.

No, we tried that, wouldn't work. I think bios upgrade (or
exchanging the board for a newer one, which is what we did)
is neccesary.

Regards,

Thomas