Re: Reboot on Startup (2.0 and 2.1)

Ken Jordan (kenjordan@massmedia.com)
Fri, 7 Nov 1997 10:42:15 -0800 (PST)


On Thu, 6 Nov 1997, Chris Evans wrote:

>
> On Wed, 5 Nov 1997, Joe Pranevich wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I recently bought a new computer, a K6-233, really nice. Unfortunately,
> > somewhere in the kernel startup phase, it reboots. So far as I know, it
> > never makes it into user space. Unfortunately, the messages go by so
> > fast that I am not able to read them.
>
> AHA! Someone else with the same problem we have on two new PC's. The
> processor seems irrelevant (one P-MMX and one K6). Like you, however, the
> motherboard in question is a Tx. Not sure if it's the same chipset and/or
> brand, will have to check.
>
> The last thing we see is "Started kswapd.. etc. etc"
>
> If any kernel guru wants to send some patched kernel to see exactly where
> the machines die, I'm more than happy to assist.
>
> In the meantime, I'm swapping the Tx for a Vx...
>
> Cheers
> Chris
>

Hmmm. Just to add another data point, I recently (two weeks ago)
purchased an A-Bit PX5 motherboard with the TX chipset and 64MB SDRAM with
a K6-200. I have had no Linux problems at all (other than a few harmless
"unknown PCI device" messages).

It doesn't seem to be just because of a TX chipset that you are having
problems.

Two thoughts (guesses) occur to me. One, I had to manually set the IO
voltage on my chip to 3.30 (this board does soft CPU setup) instead of the
BIOS default of 3.38 to make the machine reliable (but it still booted
OK). Two, one of the first things I did was to disable all of the
APM/ACPI stuff (this MB has all sorts of options to slow the CPU if the
chip gets hot and other strange stuff).

Take it easy,
Ken Jordan

BTW, I find the K6-200 TX machine is an excellent Linux box. Nice and
zippy.