Athlon bug on linux 2.4.x

[jodosha]

This is an old bug which affected Win2k (Sept 2000).

Many processors are affected: di Athlon, Athlon MP, Athlon XP and Duron, whith usage of AGP bus can crash system due to corruption of memory.

This problem regard 2.4.x kernel compilated on Pentium CPU or successive, which use extended paging. This is an Intel feature, which allow to use 4Mb pages instead of traditionally 4k (X86_FEATURE_PSE constant defined in include/asm-i386/cpufeature.h).

A rimedy is a boot loader (LiLo or GRUB) we can use append function (mem=nopentium) to back at classic paging.

for more details http://www.gentoo.org/

[jodosha]

I'm reading Gentoo's web pages (http://www.gentoo.org/) and I must add a correction:

1. Is not a bug !!!
Is a different "view" of memory by GART (component to check graphic memory) and cache, which coopertate with an AMD's function: speculative writes.

2. This is a different problem of Win2k on Sept 2000.

[linuxcomando]

I had this problem running slackware 8.0.

[jodosha]

Well, you must wait kernel's BugFix ...