Re: nforce2 lockups

["Karel Kulhavý" <clock@twibright.com>]

> This is a hunch: is it possible that gcc is compiling something a bit wrong?
> I know that some instructions when processed in a certain order, can do some
> wacky things.  Maybe a gcc bug is causing the Athlon processor to caculate
> some instructions in the right sequence where it sometimes works, and other
> times doesn't.
> 
> The reason I say this, is that I have read a few posts where one person had
> lock-ups with one distro and not the other.  Kernels are pretty much the same
> (I think we are all downloading the latest kernel source and building our own
> kernels), but gcc is different.

I realized that when I recompiled kernel from 2.4.21 to 2.6.0 it could
still be crashed on-demand. But when I replaced the 2.4.21 back it wouldn't
crash. But in meantime, when I replaced the IDE disk for another with the
same kernel, the crash could still be done on-demand.

I tried to copy the swap (disk map: 1G swap @ the beginning, ext2 the rest)
from the crashdisk to noncrashdisk verbatim if it's not dependent on the
content read (the crash was within first 10 seconds, with 40MB/s it's less than
400M from the beginning of the disk) and it didn't help. It seems it is highly
dependent on a sequence of some highly irrelevant operations during the startup
of the kernel.

> 
> Haven't tried it yet, since I am working a project 24/7 that will keep me
> until the end of the month.  Purchased the Athlon XP Gentoo 1.4 CDs, so will
> load then and may get some different results.
> 
> Ken
>