Re: Loading Pentium III microcode under Linux - catch 22!

[Chris Rankin]

 --- Tigran Aivazian <tigran@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Alternatively, yes, he can do it from within initrd.
> Hope that is early 
> enough for him.

Hi,

Yes, I think I'll go the initrd route. However,
hammering on the machine last night reproduced the
malfunction regardless of whether the microcode was
loaded or not!

(Addressing list in general:)

This board (Supermicro PIIIDME, i840 chipset) has been
stable for almost 3 years, since between 2.4.0-pre6
and 2.4.0-pre9 IIRC. All recent hangs and lock-ups
have been attributable to the IO subsystem in 2.4.20,
and it just ran 2.4.21 for 3 solid weeks. The only
thing that has really changed recently is the weather,
but the lm_sensors package (2.6.5) reports that
everything is fine.

Booting with "acpi=off" has so far prevented the
kernel from hanging just after the "Freeing unused
kernel memory" message. However, the kernel still hung
later: the first time was when reading lm_sensors
after one CPU had reached the magic BIOS setting of 55
degrees C under high load. This hang took out the
keyboard, mouse and serial console straight away, but
left the ethernet interface running for a few minutes.
The second hang was more spontaneous, and killed the
box outright.

Do ATX power supplies have temperature sensors built
into them? I have just upgraded my PSU from 300W to a
brand new 400W one, so doubt that it's faulty. Could
the power supply be triggering a temperature-related
ACPI event? I seem to recall the boot-log mentioning
assorted S and C events being supported. (Can't
remember which ones exactly: S0 and S3?)

And I have already run memtest for 2 hours without
problems.

Cheers,
Chris


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