Re: [gentoo-catalyst] LiveCD: Unpacking Firmware

[Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se>]

Colleen Josephson wrote:
> I have a ASUS M4A89TB MB which is AMD's 890FX/SB850 chipset I believe,
> a quad-core AMD Phenom II, and an ATI FirePro V3700.

Ok. You could maybe try to experiment with the graphics drivers as
well.


> Related to the power supply as in this is a hardware issue?

Basically yes, because the hardware should never behave like it does.

But it can certainly be software induced, so that a changed setting
can make the problem go away - although probably at the cost of
sacrificing something else, e.g. maybe getting higher power
consumption.


> Because the hum doesn't start until almost the end of the boot
> process on the liveCD, and if it were the power supply's fault,
> wouldn't it start as soon as I booted up the system?

When drivers load in the system (I guess you have hardware drivers
built as modules, as opposed to built-in to the kernel?) they will
start exercising their respective hardware devices. Some device, CPU,
chipset, or another, is possibly switching constantly between power
states, which the power supply in the PC might not be able to handle
completely.

It could be something simpler as well, some signals that are simply
being coupled onto analog output.

To say any more you need to find which driver is causing this. Mike's
advice is the start; find out which drivers coldplugging loads, then
e.g. load one at a time manually. At some point you should get the
noise. Then dive deeper into that particular driver case.


//Peter