Greetings, I'm poking my head into this thread because your slowness/
DMA timeout error symptoms look EXACTLY like a problem I had with an
Athlon64 Laptop recently and Suse 9.1, with both the install and
later update kernel... except mine didn't crash.
There is a thread a bit back on "suse-amd64" whose title begins with
"Suse 9.1 on my A64 laptop idles at huge load".
I summarize below:
=?iso-8859-1?q?Franz=20Mach?=
just forgot to say that i'm using SuSE 9.1 (AMD64) with the 2.6.5-7.75 kernel.
i'm also getting this error message during the startup :
Jul 15 20:59:31 LXK0D85B2 kernel: powernow-k8: BIOS error - no PSB
is this anything important ?
about slow and hot: my system isn't slow - after about 30minutes the fans start to work quite hard but it never goes too hot even after 10 hours ...
My symptoms were:
Kernel from install:
-- Powernow working.
-- Processor jumped to max speed and stayed there (2.2GHz in my
case).
-- Some DMA errors showed up in the log.
-- Load was 7-8, machine very very sluggish, but no obvious
culprits when running top. If you just count the CPU time
spent in individual processes in top/ps, the machine looked
idle, but the CPU utilization summary reported 100%.
Kernel update 2.6.5-7.95, changes:
-- Powernow broken, claim of no PSB found.
-- Runs at 800MHz.
Summary:
We found fixes for both problems.
1) Powernow broken in later kernel:
This turned out to be a simple bug and we narrowed down to a small
patch which I posted to the list near the end of the "Suse 9.1
laptop..." thread listed above. Essentially Powernow ACPI support
was disabled by accident, and we turn it back on with the patch.
2) Huge load/slowness:
This was a problem with the "powersave_proxy" script which is part
of the "powersaved" daemon. There is a bad interaction with some
ACPI BIOSes, including, unfortunately, the one on my laptop.
A simple test to see if this is the case is to stop the powersave
daemon with (as root):
/etc/init.d/powersave stop
In my case, the above got rid of the huge load. If this works for
you, then if you look through the same email thread listed above,
you'll find what I did to work around the problem but leave powersave
support enabled.
3) My machine never crashed from the heat. I agree the huge load was
probably just stressing your inadequate CPU cooling/heatsink
solution. Sorry I can't be more helpful there...
--
Erich Stefan Boleyn