Yesterday I've tried launching various kernels on Ahtlon64 Dual-core X2 3800+ with MSI Neo4 Platinum SLI motherboard.
The results were a total catastrophica failure. As soon as I enable SMP in the kernel, the sata driver would randomly hang after a bit of disk activity.
Whenever apic is enabled, the system won't even be able to boot up completely, and will hang VERY soon. Whenever I disable apic, the system is able to bootup, but when the software mirror that I use will try to resync for 2-3-10 mins, it will throw up a message and freeze again.
Whenever I disable apic AND lapic, the system is able to bootup AND work, however after same 5-10 minutes it start spitting messages, which are somewhat different thou and don't hang the system completely but render it rather unusable anyway.
As soon as I disable SMP - everything works like a charm.
For what it's worth I too have seen this same problem. It happens when I use the stock Fedora kernels but not my custom compiled kernel. I'm not sure what I compiled differently but at the time I thought that something in the new kernel fixed it.
I only use kernel.org kernels, so perhaps there's a problem with the Fedora
kernel.
I too am running an Athlon X2 using sata_nv. I have an ASUS motherboard. But what I noticed was that the problem went away if I used 2 gigs of ram instead of 4 gigs. When you use the whole 4 gigs there is some memory mapping going on and I thought perhaps the problem was related to the sata_nv not liking the memory mapped over the 4gig barrier.
That's possible. Unfortunately I cannot verify this, since there are 2GB of
RAM in my box.
I remeber someone having a problem with sata_nv DMAing over 2GB of RAM,
so there may be something wrong with it.
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