[plug] _hard_ crashes with X

[Leon Blackwell]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 03:40:40PM +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
> Yes, but supposedly limited to Athlons, NVIDIA cards (ie not Savage4,
> so this may not be it) and AGP. The Athlon's `large page' memory mode
> exercises a bug which kills Linux. There is a workaround involving a
> boot option to force normal memory pages. In theory, a PCI video card
> should avert the issue.

Actually, the problem has been know to show up with both Athlons and
Durons whenever an AGP card is in use.  Apparently, it's a problem with
AMD's speculative prefetch techniques intefering with AGP memory
allocation.  You can fix it my using a "mem=nopentium" option when
booting the kernel, or by using a recent version of 2.4.19 (which is
supposed to fix the problem).

You might also like to check your BIOS settings, since many motherboards
and AGP cards don't handle 4x (or even 2x) fastwrites properly.  The
signal strength isn't high enough, corruption occurs, and things get
weird and flaky.  Drop your AGP options down to the lowest possible,
tweak xfree so it doesn't use AGPGART (or nvidia's alternative), and see
if that helps your problems.


-- 
 Leon Blackwell                | Do not meddle in the affairs of
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