Re: Running 2.2 with >1 gig ram with Athlon

From: Chris Kloiber (ckloiber@rochester.rr.com)
Date: Wed Jul 26 2000 - 23:58:08 EST


martin leisner wrote:
>
> Some guys a work want to use a 900 Mhz Athlon with 1.5 gig of ram for
> some chip design tools. We're running redhat 6.2 (2.2pl15).
>
> I never paid much attention to talk about such a powerful systems since
> I never used one until now ;-)
>
> When it had 3 256mbyte modules, I ran lmbench, and it paniced the
> machine (3 times running).
>
> We replaced the 256 mbyte ram with 512 mbyte modules (so the machine
> had 1.5 mbyte -- we had to trade with someone else).
>
> The bios seems to have a bug...it can't detect 512m modules (so it
> sees "768M".)
>
> I did a boot with
> mem=1200m
> to see what would happen...the kernel paniced.
>
> I did a boot with
> mem=200m
> and ran lmbench successfully...
>
> Was there anything moving from 2.2pl15 to 2.4 which would effect how this works?
>
> Its "new hardware" (which AMD loaned us). Would it be useful to run a
> quick&dirty ram tester on there?
>
> I'm not convinced the hardware is necessarily good (we're giving it a workout
> with NT to see what happens).
>
> Any comments/suggestions? I'm thinking of building 2.4-test4 and see
> where it gets us.
>
> Marty Leisner
> mleisner@eng.mc.xerox.com

768M Ram sounds like a Chipset limitation. Especially if the motherboard
uses an AMD-750 chipset. If you can get a board using a VIA KX133 you
can use 2GB ram (but it own't work with a Socket-A/Thunderbird Athlon)
or you can look for a VIA KZ133 (which will work with
Socket-A/Thunderbird Athlon). If you are working closely with AMD
itself, see if they can spot you an AMD 760 (or 760MP) test motherboard
(these two chips are probably not available yet) The -MP version is
going to be an SMP chipset for Athlon. (can't wait!)

My information is from Maximum PC (July,00 pg 71)

Chris Kloiber

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