September 2006 - openSUSE AMD64 - openSUSE Mailing Lists

IOMMU...PCI memory hole...MTRR...I give up.
by David W. Hankins 26 May '07

26 May '07

I have an MSI K8D-Master-F motherboard with two Opteron 244's. It recently got retasked as a desktop machine due to another system's failure...I thought the little ATI Rage built into the motherboard would make more than a sufficient 2d desktop type framebuffer, and as far as other stuff inside this box... this should be a pretty kick ass, high performance workstation. But I can literally watch the screen redraw if I switch virtual desktops. Painfully slow. Thinking this was just some crippled built-in video bug, I threw in an old nVidia card we had lying around in one of the regular PCI slots. Slightly slower, if you can believe it. I think this: mtrr: type mismatch for e5000000,1000000 old: uncachable new: write-combining And of course this: $ cat /proc/mtrr reg00: base=0xc0000000 (3072MB), size=1024MB: uncachable, count=1 reg01: base=0x00000000 ( 0MB), size=4096MB: write-back, count=1 Has something to do with it (and may also explain why I'm getting less than stellar performance out of other PCI devices, such as the RAID array that has a 128MB memory region the driver directly reads and writes on). The above is with the nVidia PCI card inserted, the built-in ATI card would also emit a similar mtrr rejection message, just the address is different, and the system would only list 512MB uncachable without the nVidia. Also notice that there's 4GB installed in this machine, in 2 2GB DIMMs installed in one bank together. And yet the BIOS map: BIOS-provided physical RAM map: BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable) BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved) BIOS-e820: 00000000000e0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved) BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 00000000bfff0000 (usable) BIOS-e820: 00000000bfff0000 - 00000000bffff000 (ACPI data) BIOS-e820: 00000000bffff000 - 00000000c0000000 (ACPI NVS) BIOS-e820: 00000000ff7c0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved) Lists nothing beyond the 4GB mark where that memory might reasonably have been moved to. Assuming this is just a neglectful BIOS, I tried setting 'mem=4G' and 'memmap=1G@4G' kernel options, to define the 1GB 'hole' I presume is being placed here, and which got me this added line to dmesg: user: 0000000100000000 - 0000000140000000 (usable) But still only 3GB available. To add even more insult to rising injury, I noticed while looking through dmesg that the IOMMU is being disabled. It appears the value being advertised by the CPU's: CPU 0: aperture @ 1b80000000 size 128 MB Is being rejected because it lies (WELL) above the 4GB mark. I've been going through archives and I'm not finding anything that looks like actionable advice. The latest BIOS MSI's webpage lists for this motherboard is 1.1: already installed. It has no option for 'pci hole: software'. The only options I'm finding are memory bank interleaving (which I tried disabling), and 'Disabled/Best-Fit/Absolute' settings for the IOMMU, as well as its aperture size (128M, which I might increase if it would be used rather than ignored...). One post in the archive that matched on motherboard make and model looks confused to me, because he refers to his BIOS as AWARD 2.0, but the only BIOS MSI puts out for this board is AMI (versioned 1.1). In summary what I'd like to know is: 1) Where is the 'go fast' button? re: pci video that's slower than even isa video should be (and presumably similar performance problems on other PCI devices). 2) How do I get the last 25% of my memory back? 3) How do I get the system to put the IOMMU somewhere in the range it stole under 4G (so Linux can use it)? Can Linux move this on its own accord? Thanks in advance for any and all help. -- David W. Hankins "If you don't do it right the first time, Software Engineer you'll just have to do it again." Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. -- Jack T. Hankins

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powernow-k8 still not working, patch availlable?
by Michael Steinhauser 15 Sep '06

15 Sep '06

I´m running an AMD64 with kernel 2.6.16.21-0.13 default. With dmesg I get the following warning: Aug 27 08:10:18 egal kernel: ACPI Warning (acpi_utils-0065): Invalid package argument [20060127] Aug 27 08:10:18 egal kernel: ACPI Exception (acpi_processor-0274): AE_BAD_PARAMETER, Invalid _PSS data [20060127] Aug 27 08:10:18 egal kernel: cpu_init done, current fid 0xe, vid 0x0 Aug 27 08:10:18 egal kernel: powernow-k8: ph2 null fid transition 0xe Aug 27 08:10:20 egal kernel: hdb: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } Aug 27 08:10:20 egal kernel: hdb: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError } Aug 27 08:10:20 egal kernel: ide: failed opcode was: 0xef Aug 27 08:10:24 egal kernel: powernow-k8: internal error - pending bit very stuck - no further pstate changes possible Aug 27 08:10:24 egal kernel: powernow-k8: transition frequency failed. I postet this before an was told this is because of the Invalid_Pss data. Now I found this bug on bugzilla.kernel.org number 6782 for kernel 2.6.17-mm5 as resolved.PATCH_ALREADY_AVAILABLE http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6782. Is this patch available for Suse 10.1 or will it be fixed in a new Kernel-Version? Thank you Michael

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SPAM:
by maged shaker 14 Sep '06

14 Sep '06

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RDTSC synchronization in SuSE 10.x kernels
by Mikhail Kuzminsky 13 Sep '06

13 Sep '06

AFAIK some Fedora Core kernel versions support RDTSC synchronization between different CPUs of server. It's good for some micro-benchmarks runs - in the case of using RDTSC-based timers. Sorry, what is known about RDTSC synchronization between CPUs/cores in SuSE 10.x SMP kernels ? Yours Mikhail Kuzminsky Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry Moscow

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SPAM: Hotplug and system slow
by eagle＠supereva.it 11 Sep '06

11 Sep '06

Hi, I have a big problem with suse 10.1 64 bit on asus A8V - E motherbord and AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+. The system is very slow because this 2 processes take a lot CPU. root 1238 74.1 0.1 12408 1736 ? R< 10:39 4:37 /bin/bash /sbin/hwup bus-pci-0000:05:00.0 -o hotplug root 2206 44.4 0.1 12408 1740 ? R< 10:42 1:12 /bin/bash /sbin/hwup bus-pci-0000:05:00.0 -o hotplug I don't why? When a kill this 2 processes the system run well. Any idea? thanks. --------------------------------------------------------------- Mettiti al centro del mondo! Crea il tuo blog e condividi con i tuoi amici idee, immagini e video, da web e da cellulare! http://beta.dada.net/ ---------------------------------------------------------------

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purchase vs download, SMP and NUMA
by Mikhail Kuzminsky 11 Sep '06

11 Sep '06

We used a set of SuSE products for x86-64 (beginning from SLES8 and then SuSE professional 9). I have few questions about new versions. 1) Currently there are SuSE 10.x instead of SuSE professional 9.x. What is the difference between free downloadable version of 10.x (for example from opensuse.org) and SuSE 10.x DVD media I may purchase from any reseller ? 2) There is SMP kernels in the frames of SuSE 10.x. What is the restriction for number of cores per server (i.e. will it support 8 cores in dual-socket 4-cores Opteron in the next year ?) 3) In old SuSE versions there was special NUMA kernel in addition to SMP. What is about support of NUMA mode in modern kernels from 10.x ? Yours Mikhail Kuzminsky

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Porting from SLES9/EM64T SLES9/AMD64
by Rajib Majumder 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

Hi, After porting a C++ application from SLES9/EM64T architecture to SLES9/AMD64, it fails to work. Apparently, looks like a stack corruption is happening. It works perfect on SLES9/EM64T arch. Any idea what might have gone wrong? Env is same on both boxes and gcc used was 3.3.2 to build the application. Any input is highly appreciated. Thanks Rajib

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