[SUMMARY] rebooting problem solved - athlon/SiS incompatibility.

[SUMMARY] rebooting problem solved - athlon/SiS incompatibility.

[Russell Miller]

Hi,

As a follow up to a message that I sent earlier, I've found
the reason that my machine would reboot on 2.6 kernels.  It
could be argued that it's no fault of the kernel, but perhaps
the documentation should be updated.

I traced the problem to between the gunzip() call and the
startup32 call.  There are very few options that affect this,
obviously.  Two that do are CONFIG_SMP and the coprocessor
emulation option.  After turning them off and rebuilding,
the kernel started.  It hung on ACPI, but after compiling that
out of the kernel, it booted fine and I'm running it now.

This is the output of lspci, to show the configuration that will
cause this problem:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 730 Host (rev 02)
00:00.1 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev d0)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 85C503/5513
00:01.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (rev 07)
00:01.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (rev 07)
00:01.4 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 02)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5591/5592 AGP
00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139 (rev 10)
00:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139 (rev 10)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS630 GUI Accelerator+3D (rev 31)

and:

processor	: 0
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 6
model		: 4
model name	: AMD Athlon(tm) processor
stepping	: 2
cpu MHz		: 902.169
cache size	: 256 KB
fdiv_bug	: no
hlt_bug		: no
f00f_bug	: no
coma_bug	: no
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 1
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips	: 1785.85

Which basically seems to mean:  you cannot enable SMP and turn off coprocessor
emulation on an SiS motherboard containing an Athlon Thunderbird processor.  The
kernel will not even get past the "Ok, booting the kernel" stage.

--Russell

Re: [SUMMARY] rebooting problem solved - athlon/SiS incompatibility.

[Dave Jones]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 03:54:29PM -0500, Russell Miller wrote:

 > Which basically seems to mean:  you cannot enable SMP and turn off coprocessor
 > emulation on an SiS motherboard containing an Athlon Thunderbird processor.  The
 > kernel will not even get past the "Ok, booting the kernel" stage.

Which option do you mean by 'Coprocessor emulation' ?
If you mean the math emulation, it doesn't get used on a machine
with a real FPU, so this doesn't make any sense.

Is your board actually an SMP capable board ?
The choice of thunderbirds in an SMP system is also curious.
Thunderbirds are model 4. The only models certified for use in
SMP are model 6 and above. (See arch/i386/kernel/smpboot line 136 or so)

		Dave

-- 
 Dave Jones     http://www.codemonkey.org.uk

Re: [SUMMARY] rebooting problem solved - athlon/SiS incompatibility.

[Russell Miller]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 10:04:29PM +0100, Dave Jones wrote:

...

Note the words "an athlon thunderbird processor".  The documentation says, as
I remember, that turning on SMP on a UP board should have no appreciable effect.

I take that back, it says it should run on many, but not all, uniprocessor machines.
So instead of what I said, please note that the K7SEM is a motherboard that will not
work with an SMP kernel.

--Russell

> 		Dave
> 
> -- 
>  Dave Jones     http://www.codemonkey.org.uk

Re: [SUMMARY] rebooting problem solved - athlon/SiS incompatibility.

[Andi Kleen]

Russell Miller <rmiller@duskglow.com> writes:

> On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 10:04:29PM +0100, Dave Jones wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> Note the words "an athlon thunderbird processor".  The documentation says, as
> I remember, that turning on SMP on a UP board should have no appreciable effect.

It has the effect of turning on the IO-APIC, which often causes problems.

Check if you can boot with noapic with the SMP kernel

-Andi