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List:       linux-smp
Subject:    Gigabyte GA-686DLX troubles
From:       Andrew Richards <physajr () phys ! canterbury ! ac ! nz>
Date:       1998-02-08 13:53:46
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I've got a Gigabyte GA-686DLX Dual Pentium II (233MHz) motherboard with
the 440LX chipset (including 1 broken BIOS). The machine has 2 PII-233
processors, 256MB RAM, an onboard Adaptec 7880 (active but not used)
and an Asus ncr53c875 based card connected to a local disk and a RAID array.

I've had several problems with the board and still can't get it to work
correctly.

Under the standard RedHat-5.0, 2.0.32 kernel (no SMP) everything works
fine.  After adding the mem=255M line to lilo.conf the machine
pagefaults when any memory over 64M is used.

After adding SMP=1 to the makefile (and leaving out the mem=255M line)
the machine boots up detects two processors but one comes up at 2
bogomips due to the BIOS bug.

After adding the patch at http://www.linux.org.uk/SMP/fix-bios the
machine crashes on startup.

Time to go for the bleeding edge?

Kernel 2.1.85 including Mathias Fr"ohlich's mtrr-fix-2.1.82.  The kernel
boots up detects two processors, works around the BIOS and comes up with
some nice looking bogomips numbers. The 256M of memory is automatically
detected. Is it still necessary to use mem=255M in the 2.1.8x kernels?
To be safe I added mem=255M and rebooted. The machine appears to work
well under most circumstances, however under load (2 glimpseindex's on
100MB directories on different disks) the machine crashes with: 

Page fault from irq handler: 0002
CPU: 0
...
<regs stack>
...
Aiee, killing interupt handler
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill idle task!
In swapper task - not syncing


Does anyone have any comments?

What I would like to try is the BIOS fix in Mathias Fr"ohlich 2.1.82
patch against 2.0.32-33 if such a thing exists. This might help to
eliminate any problems with the new kernels (this machine is going to be
a file/web/ftp server).

Failing that what motherboard should I swap to to get a stable system
under the production kernels?

Andrew Richards
-----
All those moments will be lost in time - like tears in rain. Time to die.

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