On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:22 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:

...

List, Jan:

Still wrestling with my MCE fun, I am passing the kernel parameters "noapic" and "nolapic". Scrolling through dmesg, I have run across something that looks real strange. It may not be. I may just not yet know what I'm reading, but I would like for someone to confirm that the kernel is respecting the nolapic setting. kernel is: 2.6.23.17-ccj64-default. Specifically, my command line is:

Command line: root=/dev/mapper/nvidia_hacfgfda_part7 vga=0x31a resume=/dev/mapper/nvidia_hacfgfda_part6 splash=0 apic=verbose noapic nolapic

[ 0.000000] Initializing CPU#0 <snip>

[ 37.799957] Using local APIC timer interrupts. [ 37.845175] result 12558028 [ 37.845176] Detected 12.558 MHz APIC timer. [ 37.846233] SMP alternatives: switching to SMP code [ 37.846663] Booting processor 1/2 APIC 0x1 [ 37.856841] Initializing CPU#1

I can't say for sure, and probably only the kernel hackers can. But I wonder if your machine can't run in smp mode without apic?

I have nohpet on my command line (since opensuse 10.1) and yet I see the current kernel puts this line in the boot.msg: <7>Force enabled HPET at base address 0xfed00000

Command line parms are fleeting at best and rather poorly documented in my opinion.

...

Next, why is my kernel using Intel MultiProcessor Specification v1.4 with an AMD Opteron 180 processor?

Because Intel developed this particular MultiProcessor spec, AMD stole it and developed Dual Core CPUs, and Intel stole it back. All under cross licensing agreements - supposedly. Hi David, your best bet is to disable hpet, apic, and any other fancy performance enhancing features selectively in your bios. There used to be a feature to assign interupt to vga but I checked in mine and it was gone. I've researched kernel debuggers but the only concrete thing I found was kdb, which is built in to the kernel and enabled by the very last check under kernel hacking in xconfig or menuconfig. Try http://oss.sgi.com/projects/kdb/ and the help in xconfig is also helpful it tells you how to start it from a serial terminal anyway. I can see why this problem is being bounced around like a hot potato anyway. I usually recompile my kernel to reconfigure it to my processor. I can't speak for the 64 bit package but suse's default is made to cover a wide range of machines. This setting might be of interest to you :- Check for non-fatal errors on AMD Athlon/Duron / Intel Pentium 4 (X86_MCE_NONFATAL)

Enabling this feature starts a timer that triggers every 5 seconds which will look at the machine check registers to see if anything happened. Non-fatal problems automatically get corrected (but still logged). Disable this if you don't want to see these messages. Seeing the messages this option prints out may be indicative of dying or out-of-spec (ie, overclocked) hardware. This option only does something on certain CPUs. (AMD Athlon/Duron and Intel Pentium 4) Hope this helps a bit, it all adds to my education. I'll read your next posts in my morning, which is your afternoon. Regards Dave Plater -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org