Re: VIA Southbridge bug (Was: Crash on boot (2.4.5))

David Balazic
2001-07-10T09:12:55Z

Rob Landley (landley@webofficenow.com) wrote :
> On Sunday 08 July 2001 13:37, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > > possible on the memory bus. Several people have reported that machines
> > > > that are otherwise stable on the bios fast options require the proper
> > > > conservative settings to be stable with the Athlon optimisations
> > >
> > > Do we need patch to memtest to use 3dnow?
> >
> > Possibly yes. Although memtest86 really tries to test for onchip not bus
> > related problems
>
> What else tends to fail on the motherboard that might be easy to test for?
> Processor overheating? (When the thermometer circuitry's there, anyway.)
> Something to do with DMA? (Would DMA to/from a common card like VGA catch
> chipset-side DMA problems?) There was an SMP exception thing floating by
> recently, is that common and testable?
>
> I know there's a lot of funky peripheral combinations that behave strangely,
> but without opening that can of worms what kind of common problems on the
> motherboard itself might be easy to test for in a "run this overnight and see
> if it finds a problem with your hardware" sort of way?
>
> Rob
>
> (P.S. What kind of CPU load is most likely to send a processor into overheat?

CPUburn from http://users.ev1.net/~redelm/

My Celeron 300 oc'ed to 450 run RC5 and Mersenne Prime for hours,
but locked up after 5 minutes of CPU burn.

The best CPU ( and bus/memory) test program that exists, IMHO

> (Other than "a tight loop", thanks. I mean what kind of instructions?)
> This is going to be CPU specific, isn't it? Our would a general instruction
> mix that doesn't call halt be enough? It would need to keep the FPU busy
> too, wouldn't it? And maybe handle interrupts. Hmmm...)
>
> I wonder... The torture test Tom's Hardware guide uses for processor
> overheating is GCC compiling the Linux kernel. (That's what caught the
> Pentium III 1.13 gigahertz instability when nothing else would.) I wonder,
> maybe if a stripped down subset of a known version of GCC and a known version
> of the kernel were running from a ramdisk... It USED to fit in 8 megs with
> no swap, might still fit in 32 with a decent chunk of kernel source. Throw
> the compile in a loop, add in a processor temperature detector daemon to kill
> the test and HLT the system if the temperature went too high...
>
> I wonder what bits of the kernel GCC actually needs to run these days?
> (System V inter-process communication? sysctl support? Hmmm... Would
> 2.4.anything be a stable enough base for this yet, or should it be 2.2.19?
> Is 2.4 still psychotic with less swap space than ram (I.E. no swap space at
> all)?)
>
> Off to play...
>
> Still Rob.

--
David Balazic
--------------
"Be excellent to each other." - Bill & Ted
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