Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 13 Nov 2001 16:08:24 -0500 (EST) | From | "Calin A. Culianu" <> | Subject | Re: What Athlon chipset is most stable in Linux? |
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On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Martin Eriksson wrote:
> I'm hearing rumours about my University wanting to set up a cluster with AMD > Athlon XP+DDR computers, so I wonder what chipset is most stable under > Linux? > > I assume it's the AMD DDR chipset, but I want to be pretty sure. > > Btw, do compilators currently optimize for the third floating-point unit in > Athlon XP processors?
Well, here's my little anecdote:
We bought 33 1.4 GHz AMD Athlons (non-XP) with the slightly deprecated VIA KT266 Chipset (Spacewalker AK31 motherboards.. not exactly the Lexus of the M/B world but oh well)..
Anyway, after trying various (2.4) kernel versions, both with and without the new VM, both with and without Alan's magik, I can say that the only way we got 99% uptime on these systems (as opposed to like the 70% uptime I was getting from random kernel oopses) was to turn any Athlon and/or Pentium optimizations off when compiling the kernel. With any form of compilation for a CPU >386, the kernel would crash on at least 2 of the boxes per day. The oops stack trace seemed to always indicate a crash when in the paging code.. so it was a virtual memory problem? (I can only speculate and I haven't bothered to investigate much further). I am not sure if I encountered some unknown bug in my motherboard that needs some yet undiscovered workaround or what. All I can say is stay away from the KT266 chipset (however the newer KT266A seems to work fine based on what I have seen and am told) if you can. But then again I may be crazy and/or there may be workarounds or bios fixes for my problem, if it was really kernel-related. (I suspect it was, but haven't bothered to figure out exactly how to reproduce it so as to submit a patch.. the systems would crash randomly and invesitigating it futher seemed onerous).
-Calin
> > _____________________________________________________ > | Martin Eriksson <nitrax@giron.wox.org> > | MSc CSE student, department of Computing Science > | Umeå University, Sweden > > > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ >
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