Suse 9.2, ASUS SK8N and 4GB RAM woes
I have a dual boot system of Suse 9.2 Pro and WinXP in my AMD Opteron system with ASUS SK8N motherboard and 4 GB of RAM (4 sticks of 1 GB registered RAM). The original bios in SK8N (Ver 1.002) only saw 3.5 GB of RAM. This was attributed to Soutbridge resource allocation in ASUS's SK8N manual. Consequently both Windows XP and Suse 9.2 saw 3.5 GB system memory as well. I came across this newsgroup posting (http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/2004/04/msg00087.html) and I decided to update the bios. I updated the bios to ver 1.004 and then to 1.007 via two different bios flash methods per ASUS's instructions. Everything went smooth. Lo and behold, after doing the "Northbridge config: Remap above 4GB", the motherboard can infact see the full 4GB of RAM. Windows XP boots fine, however it sees 3GB of RAM. This is what I had expected originally from the 32 bit OS. On the other hand, when I wanted to boot into the 64 bit Suse 9.2, I get a kernel panic with a message saying: CPU 0: Machine Check Exception 4 bank 4: b2000000000070f0f TSC 3231cda3fc Kernel Panic - not syncing: Machine check I tried adding append="mem=2048M", "mem=3072M" and append="mem=4096M" one at a time in menu.lst of grub - but that didn't help. I did check the ram with memtest86 and all tests said that the ram is good, no errors. Things get complicated when I decided to reinstall Suse 9.2 pro. Now the installation from dvd hangs with a black screen. I read in a newsgroup that there is some issue with USB host controller in ASUS SK8N motherboard interfering with over 4GB RAM. http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-amd64/2004-Dec/0089.html I tried disabling the USB controller but then my wireless USB keyboard and mouse combo is non-functional. I hooked up a ps2 keyboard and mouse, but my system still gives kernel panic during install. I went back to the bios and disabled the mapping of northbridge memory setting for 4GB. Now I can boot into Suse just fine, no kernel panic. Of course the system sees 3.5GB RAM. I would really love to use all 4GB of ram in my system since I paid for it. Any help or suggestion will be highly appreciated!
I would really love to use all 4GB of ram in my system since I paid for it. Any help or suggestion will be highly appreciated!
You have to talk to the BIOS vendor. Setting up the memory control is purely a BIOS issue. -Andi
Thanks for your suggestion. I am not sure what that means. The bios vendor, AMIBIOS has provided the option of mapping the memory so that the system sees the whole 4GB. Its just that I can't boot into Suse 9.2 64 bit. Maybe you can clarify more.
On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 02:05:17PM -0700, Kaushik Mallick wrote:
Thanks for your suggestion. I am not sure what that means. The bios vendor, AMIBIOS has provided the option of mapping the memory so that the system sees the whole 4GB. Its just that I can't boot into Suse 9.2 64 bit. Maybe you can clarify more.
You can't boot into SUSE because the BIOS sets up the memory or other mappings incorrectly with that option. That's a BIOS bug. -Andi
OK, I will try to contact them. But is there any work around that I can try in the meantime?
It was suggested here (http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-amd64/2005-Jan/0116.html) that a kernel update might help. I am running 2.6.8-24.10-default. Is there any kernel update beyond this one that I should try?
Can you kindly provide more specifics on the new kernel that supposedly fixes the problem? Thanks.
Hi Kaushik: The new kernel is available from one of the mirror sites. I use ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/i386/update/9.2/rpm/x86_64/ What I would like to do is to build a new set of bootable media using it. Is this possible? Are there instructions somewhere? Joe Kaushik Mallick wrote:
Can you kindly provide more specifics on the new kernel that supposedly fixes the problem? Thanks.
If its the kernel-default-2.6.8-24.10, I already have that. Whats the nogpl versions?
participants (3)
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Andi Kleen -
Joe Landman -
Kaushik Mallick