On Monday 17 September 2001 8:07 am, Guy Van Sanden wrote:
Hello everyone
I've posted some messages to this list a while ago about my Asus A7V133A motherboard running too hot with Linux. Thanks to all of you who tried to help me!
I think I found the problem. The BIOS fails to initialize a register in my CPU to make it accept HLT instructions. With Win9x, that doesn't matter, because it doesn't generate those instructions anyway. If you use programs like CPUIDLE, they set the register correctly, and you don't see the problem.
I don't know if it only affects my board (production error), or that the problems is much wider... But I've tested with an Elite motherboard, same CPU, it runs at 34°C idle, compared to 55°C on the Asus.
This could be a major problem for all Linux users owning such a board.
Is anyone here running the same board? I would like to gather some information to solve the problem. I've posted this to Asus support also.
I don't know if I've misunderstood what you're saying but I'd expect Windows 9x to run hot too since it doesn't issue HLT instructions. Linux and Windows NT do so they should suspend the processor until an interrupt, NMI or reset occurs. That is, if you don't have an ASUS A7V! Your board also uses STOP GRANT STATES, which is controlled by the chipset to manage idle processes and this is disabled in the A7V BIOS, which is why your CPU is getting hot. Only version 1003 fully supports the idle process, see: http://usit.shef.ac.uk/~aca00lad/chips/reg52.htm. There's also reference to enabling SGS by editing the PCI configuration register. So as you can see this is a problem for ASUS users regardless of OS used. It's not a Linux problem! M