David,
I'm beginning to suspect that it's not just the Gigabyte board that is having the problems with x86_64 and AMD multicore processors. I don't know if you have seen my post asking for your help yet, but I am in the exact same boat with a Tyan Tomcat K8E S2865ANRF Socket939 with Opteron 185 (Ver 2.00.00), (2 Gig OCX Platinum -- certified by OCX in Denmark and returned 2 weeks ago) and a pair of Seagate 500G drives in raid 1. It's not memory, there are no errors and the box will run just fine at idle but crash when you put it under load. (not very functional regardless of the specs)
At least in your case with the Gigabyte board and in my case with the Tyan board, there is something in the 10.3 x86_64 setup that is crashing under load and leaving nary a trace as to why? The Tyan board even supports Linux. I don't know what is new in the dual core chipsets on the boards, but somewhere there _is_ something rotten in Zürich (or is that Denmark?)
What is helpful and unique about the Tyan board is that is comes with an onboard (literally on the board - you have to take the side cover off) 2 digit lcd display that shows the current bios state and bios codes for the current state of the machine. I have watched and logged all bios codes and watched it run through its internal self tests and everything is shown as 100% OK. No problems from POST to fully loaded in KDE. I have also turned all unneeded peripherals off in the bios to eliminate any irq conflicts and booted with and without noapic and nolapic - makes no difference.
I suspect it may be worth a bug report to investigate given that we now have a Gigabyte and Tyan boards experiencing the same thing. I searched bugzilla.novell.com and didn't find any other entries. Did you file a bug report? If not, I'll try and get one in next week.
Not sure this is helpful, but I have been running opensuse 10_3 x86_64 without problems on an Epox 9NPA-Ultra motherboard, 4GB of OCZ ram and an AMD Opteron 144. this is a Socket 939 motherboard. I have had zero problems with this setup. this particular setup is the backup server for our small office. The main server runs opensuse 10.2 x86_64 on a Tyan Tomcat n3400 (S2925) This is an AM@ socket, and has 4 GB of A-data Ram DDR2 800 and a dual core Opteron 1218. The only reason reason this has 10.2 instead of 10.3 is that vmware workstation 5.5 did not run on opensuse 10.3. My server runs linux as the file server and then has two virtual machines. One virtual is Windows SBS 2003 (sorry, but our donor management software only runs on windows) and the other virtual machine is SME Server, our linux email and web server. When I get a chance I will upgrade the main server to 10.3, as I have now upgraded vmware workstation to 6.0. In any event I have 10.3 x86_64 running fine on a Socket 939 board, for what that is worth. Presumably you ran Memtest for a few hours to verify your memory. I know your post indicated that OCZ verified the memory, and OCZ is good stuff, but I would certainly run Memtest anyway, if yo haven't already. Mike I -- Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue, Suite 203 New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 Tel 914-632-3778 Fax 914-632-5502 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org