On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, you wrote:

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Bob,

I really appreciate your help. Right now this machine has no cards in it! The motherboard (an epox EP-7KXA) has on-board sound, which I have enabled, but I don't have a sound driver installed under linux. The only other hardware I have installed is the HD (kind of hard to do without), a cdrom, and a cdburner (not using it in Linux since I haven't gone through the SCSI emulation fun to get it working) and the agp card. Unfortunately, I don't have another graphics card to try out. The USB ports are disabled in

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bios.

One of the unknown's (in my mind anyway) is the hard drive. It is an IBM Deskstar UDMA-66 7200rpm drive. The motherboard supports UDMA66. Before installing any software, I ran a utility provided by IBM to disable UDMA66 on the drive. It will stay disabled until the kernel supports 66, when I will turn it back on. I am not in a position to thy the beta kernel

Update: On Bob's advice, I ran bonnie with a file size of 512MB at both 100 and 133 mem bus speed. No problems encountered in either case. Performance was not spectacular, however, so I checked hdparm. Everything is turned off except readahead=8. Could the fact that I don't have IRQ masking enabled be causing a problem for ld? I did some more compiling yesterday, with no problems encountered, but I was being very careful to make sure that all saves were flushed to disk before I ran make. The program I am making is very small, so there was no hard drive activity while ld was running. (I was also running with a 100mhz mem bus, so that could have helped too.) To improve performance, and possibly stability, what should I turn on with hdparm, and where should I do it so that it happens every time I boot up? (read the man page, but it wasn't very helpful, and seemed to be somewhat dated) On a side note, since I turned off sleep mode in the screen saver, I haven't had a single lockup in win98. Thanks again for the help. Ray ----- Original Message ----- From: BobF <FBob@wt.net> To: Raymond C. Maple <mapler@erinet.com> Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2000 7:00 PM Subject: Re: [SLE] Pentium optimized Kernel safe for Athlon? the patch -

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I need the machine too much. A lot of my problems (both in linux and win98) seem to happen when the hard drive is active.

Another possiblity is the memory bus. I can run it at 133 or 100. Most of the time I have run it at 133, including the overnight memory testing. I do seem to have fewer problems running it at 100, but it is hard to say, since I haven't done a whole lot at that setting. The Crucial memory I bought (7ns CAS2 PC133) is known to run stable at 152Mhz in this board.

All Athlon boards are known for having problems with the power supply. Many stories are told of people who installed a high-end PS and had all their lockups disappear, especially when using Nvidia based video cards. (I have a TNT2 based card) I bought a PS that is on the AMD approved list, but I haven't heard of anyone with any experience with this brand (Ever Power - comes in the Yeong-Yang case.) I can pick up a very good PS locally, and will try that next.

I don't think any IRQs are sharing, but I will check to make sure.

I would unplug the two cdrom drives (less ps load) and try running Bonnie with a file size bigger than your memory. This will exercise the hd and dma. See if that causes a problem.

I assume you are not overclocking (yet).

The front side bus and the speed of the hd read/ write is related (a ratio of 3/2 or something). Be sure this is correct in your bios.

If you can you might also try lowering the bus to 66mhz and see if that makes a difference.

Get back to me if you make any headway (or not).

Bob F

EMail FBob@wt.net

A Truly Wise Man Never Plays Leapfrog With A Unicorn...

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