PAT support (or lack of) for Pentium 3 CPU's

PAT support (or lack of) for Pentium 3 CPU's

[Brad Allen]

It has come to my attention that PAT support has been disabled for P3 CPU's in kernel versions 2.6.30 and later due to a bug in the CPU. 

I have attempted to get the NVIDIA proprietary drivers working with these kernel versions and 3 different Pentium 3 motherboards, all have failed. The drivers seem to require PAT support in order to work correctly, each board has in fact produced a different error when using only MTRR.

Can a kernel option be added to enable/disable PAT for P3 CPU's? Or is there any possible workaround for the bug?

I'd be interested to hear from Radeon users running a 2.6.30 or later kernel.

For anyone wondering why I still use such an old machine, I require ISA support.

Cheers,

Brad Allen

Re: PAT support (or lack of) for Pentium 3 CPU's

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:09:04 -0700
"Brad Allen" <braddo@tranceaddict.net> wrote:

> It has come to my attention that PAT support has been disabled for P3 CPU's in kernel versions 2.6.30 and later due to a bug in the CPU. 
> 
> I have attempted to get the NVIDIA proprietary drivers working with these kernel versions and 3 different Pentium 3 motherboards, all have failed. The drivers seem to require PAT support in order to work correctly, each board has in fact produced a different error when using only MTRR.
> 
> Can a kernel option be added to enable/disable PAT for P3 CPU's? Or is there any possible workaround for the bug?

Please ask Nvidia for support on their proprietary products. Only they
have all the code.

Re: PAT support (or lack of) for Pentium 3 CPU's

[Robert Hancock]

On 06/16/2009 09:09 AM, Brad Allen wrote:
> It has come to my attention that PAT support has been disabled for P3 CPU's in kernel versions 2.6.30 and later due to a bug in the CPU.
>
> I have attempted to get the NVIDIA proprietary drivers working with these kernel versions and 3 different Pentium 3 motherboards, all have failed. The drivers seem to require PAT support in order to work correctly, each board has in fact produced a different error when using only MTRR.
>
> Can a kernel option be added to enable/disable PAT for P3 CPU's? Or is there any possible workaround for the bug?
>
> I'd be interested to hear from Radeon users running a 2.6.30 or later kernel.
>
> For anyone wondering why I still use such an old machine, I require ISA support.

What's the error(s) you are getting? PAT support was only added fairly 
recently, so obviously the driver should not require it for operation.