[gentoo-dev] New 2.4.18_pre3 (2.4.18_pre3+mjc+XFS) kernel and Athlon bug workaround

[gentoo-dev] New 2.4.18_pre3 (2.4.18_pre3+mjc+XFS) kernel and Athlon bug workaround

[Daniel Robbins]

Hi All,

If you have an Athlon system, be sure this email in its entirety.  A
potential CPU bug fix workaround is covered at the bottom.

I've spent the last few days working on a new kernel for Gentoo Linux. 
This kernel is *excellent* (it's basically the -mjc kernel plus XFS) and
contains tons of security-related enhancements, including:

XFS                                            (from 16 Jan 01 CVS)
Preemptible Kernel Patch (2.4.18-pre3)         (Robert M. Love)
Waitqueue Patch                                (William Lee Irwin III)
Parallel Scanning Patch                        (William Lee Irwin III)
Reverse Mapping Patch #11b                     (Rik van Riel)
IEEE-1394 fixes                                (Andrew Morton)
Mini Low Latency Patch                         (Andrew Morton)
Loopback Deadlock Fixes                        (Andrew Morton)
Read Latency Fixes                             (Andrew Morton)
Truncate Garbage Fixes                         (Andrew Morton)
kGDB                                           (kgdb team)
Zerocopy Pipes                                 (Manfred Spraul)
Pollselect Fixes                               (Manfred Spraul)
Jiffies wraparound fix                         (Tim Schmielau)
RivaFB Software blanking                       (?)
O(1) Scheduler                                 (Ingo Molnar)
-O(1) 'sleep history' comment readability      (me)
TUX linux kernel webserver                     (Ingo Molnar et al)

You can read more about the filesystem read latency fixes at:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0201.0/1654.html

The low-down is that it improves disk IO performance up to 30x (yes,
that's *30 times* in certain situations (generally combined read/write
activity).  And that's just one patch.

This kernel is on Portage now at sys-kernel/linux-sources-2.4.18_pre3.
If you see a _pre4, don't use it.  It will work but it missing nearly
all of these performance enhancing patches, so _pre3 is best.

When testing this kernel, I experienced a problem with my
hardware-accelerated NVIDIA drivers where my system would lock up
whenever I started a *multithreaded* OpenGL application.  I was able to
work around this problem by typing 'export __GL_SINGLE_THREADED="yes"'
before starting the program from the shell.  However, I of course wanted
to be able to use NVIDIA's OpenGL implementation in all its
multithreaded glory.  Fortunately, I was able to reach Terrence Ripperda
from the NVIDIA Linux driver team.  He didn't have a solution but did
mention that there quite a few Athlon CPUs have a particular bug where
the Athlon will corrupt memory if it is using 4Mb page tables with AGP. 
He said that you could tell the kernel to *not* use 4Mb page tables by 
passing the 'mem=nopentium' option to the kernel at boot-time, ie via
GRUB.  I tried this and my problems completely disappeared.  I
immediately contacted some kernel developers, and now Alan Cox and
Terrence are going to try to track down this particular bug and add
support for autodetecting it to the Linux kernel.

Microsoft seems to have discovered this bug, too.  See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q270715
Their fix involves changing the default page table size (preventing a
big page table) by tweaking the registry.

So, if you are having stability problems (lock-ups, etc) on an Athlon
system, particularly with 2.4.18_pre3 which seems to make this bug more
prominent, try using the 'mem=nopentium' option which tells the kernel
to effectively work around this CPU bug.  My system is now rock solid
and thanks to the new kernel is also running incredibly fast.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins                                  <drobbins@gentoo.org>
Chief Architect/President                       http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.

Re: [gentoo-dev] New 2.4.18_pre3 (2.4.18_pre3+mjc+XFS) kernel and Athlon bug workaround

[Joachim Blaabjerg]

On 18 Jan 2002 21:26:15 -0700
Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> If you have an Athlon system, be sure this email in its entirety.  A
> potential CPU bug fix workaround is covered at the bottom.
> 
> I've spent the last few days working on a new kernel for Gentoo Linux. 
> This kernel is *excellent* (it's basically the -mjc kernel plus XFS) and
> contains tons of security-related enhancements, including:
<snip>

Nice patch :)

There are some redundant files, though:

root:/usr/src/linux# find . -name \*\~
./fs/intermezzo/vfs.c~
./fs/buffer.c~
./fs/dquot.c~
./fs/inode.c~
./fs/namei.c~
./init/main.c~
./kernel/ksyms.c~
./mm/filemap.c~
./mm/page_alloc.c~
./mm/slab.c~
./mm/vmalloc.c~
./mm/vmscan.c~
./include/linux/fs.h~
./include/linux/mm.h~
./include/linux/pagemap.h~
./include/linux/slab.h~
./include/linux/sysctl.h~
./drivers/block/ll_rw_blk.c~
./drivers/char/serial.c~
./arch/i386/kernel/entry.S~
./arch/i386/kernel/irq.c~
./arch/i386/kernel/process.c~
./arch/i386/kernel/traps.c~
./arch/i386/Makefile~
./arch/i386/config.in~
./arch/i386/defconfig~
./arch/i386/vmlinux.lds~
./arch/ppc/configs/common_defconfig~
./arch/ppc/configs/gemini_defconfig~
./arch/ppc/configs/ibmchrp_defconfig~
./arch/ppc/configs/power3_defconfig~
./arch/ppc/defconfig~
./arch/m68k/vmlinux-sun3.lds~
./arch/m68k/vmlinux.lds~
./arch/arm/vmlinux-armo.lds.in~
./arch/arm/vmlinux-armv.lds.in~
./arch/s390/defconfig~
./arch/s390x/defconfig~
./Documentation/Configure.help~
./MAINTAINERS~
./Makefile~
root:/usr/src/linux# grep \~\ linux linux-gentoo-2.4.18-pre3.patch 
diff -urN linux-orig/Documentation/Configure.help~
linux/Documentation/Configure.help~ diff -urN linux-orig/MAINTAINERS~
linux/MAINTAINERS~ diff -urN linux-orig/Makefile~ linux/Makefile~
diff -urN linux-orig/arch/arm/vmlinux-armo.lds.in~
linux/arch/arm/vmlinux-armo.lds.in~ diff -urN
linux-orig/arch/arm/vmlinux-armv.lds.in~ linux/arch/arm/vmlinux-armv.lds.in~
diff -urN linux-orig/arch/i386/Makefile~ linux/arch/i386/Makefile~ diff -urN
linux-orig/arch/i386/config.in~ linux/arch/i386/config.in~ diff -urN
linux-orig/arch/i386/defconfig~ linux/arch/i386/defconfig~ diff -urN
linux-orig/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S~ linux/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S~ diff -urN
linux-orig/arch/i386/kernel/irq.c~ linux/arch/i386/kernel/irq.c~ diff -urN
linux-orig/arch/i386/kernel/process.c~ linux/arch/i386/kernel/process.c~ diff
-urN linux-orig/arch/i386/kernel/traps.c~ linux/arch/i386/kernel/traps.c~ diff
-urN linux-orig/arch/i386/vmlinux.lds~ linux/arch/i386/vmlinux.lds~ diff -urN
linux-orig/arch/m68k/vmlinux-sun3.lds~ linux/arch/m68k/vmlinux-sun3.lds~ diff
-urN linux-orig/arch/m68k/vmlinux.lds~ linux/arch/m68k/vmlinux.lds~ diff -urN
linux-orig/arch/ppc/configs/common_defconfig~
linux/arch/ppc/configs/common_defconfig~[...]

Regards :)

-- 
Joachim Blaabjerg
styx@SuxOS.org
www.SuxOS.org

Re: [gentoo-dev] New 2.4.18_pre3 (2.4.18_pre3+mjc+XFS) kernel and Athlon bug workaround

[Joachim Blaabjerg]

On Sat, 19 Jan 2002 15:09:52 +0100
Joachim Blaabjerg <styx@suxos.org> wrote:
<snip>

Argh, Sylpheed didn't handle that wrapping too well, sorry.

-- 
Joachim Blaabjerg
styx@SuxOS.org
www.SuxOS.org

[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-user] New 2.4.18_pre3 (2.4.18_pre3+mjc+XFS) kernel and Athlon bug workaround

[Daniel Mettler]

hi all,

On 18 Jan 2002, Daniel Robbins wrote:
> This kernel is *excellent* (it's basically the -mjc kernel plus XFS) and
> contains tons of security-related enhancements, including:

thanks a lot! gentoo developers do a great work! i enjoy using
gentoo very much as it is the best distro available and it has a
nice community :) i hope i will be able to contribute one day
too.

> He said that you could tell the kernel to *not* use 4Mb page tables by
> passing the 'mem=nopentium' option to the kernel at boot-time, ie via
> GRUB.  I tried this and my problems completely disappeared.

unfortunately mines do not. i got an athlon 1 ghz (not xp) and a
nvidia geforce 2 gts (asus v7700) on an asus a7v board. i built
2.4.18_pre3 with the same options (except that i disabled acpi
support due to some bugs suspected there) as i did with
2.4.16-r3. everything seems to have gone fine, even the problems
i previously had with xfree freezing at "wake-up" from power save
modes disappeared (probably as i disabled acpi). but now xfree
does not start anymore with the 'nvidia' module enabled. as a
quickfix i just switched back to the standard xfree 'nv' module,
but i really hope to get 'nvidia' working again soon (who does
not like to play some games from time to time? ;). btw. i do pass
the 'mem=nopentium' option to the kernel from grub.

any idea how to fix this?

if helpful i can send some log/config file data of my box.

regards

dani

-- 
      ...::: Daniel Mettler | http://www.numlock.ch :::....

Re: [gentoo-dev] New 2.4.18_pre3 (2.4.18_pre3+mjc+XFS) kernel and Athlon bug

[Jano Lukac]

Installs fine and everything plays nice on my system (dual p3).  I don't
have problems with my nvidia tnt2 card.  What is the rivafb software
blanking thing?

As far as the mjc patch, is stuff from his older patches included in the
newer ones?  I got the option for lock-break, which would seem to be
somewhat contra the mini-low-latency patch?  I know it's included in the
version 2 and 1.

jano

Daniel Robbins said:
> Hi All,
>
> If you have an Athlon system, be sure this email in its entirety.  A
> potential CPU bug fix workaround is covered at the bottom.
>
> I've spent the last few days working on a new kernel for Gentoo Linux.
> This kernel is *excellent* (it's basically the -mjc kernel plus XFS)
> and contains tons of security-related enhancements, including:
>
> XFS                                            (from 16 Jan 01 CVS)
> Preemptible Kernel Patch (2.4.18-pre3)         (Robert M. Love)
> Waitqueue Patch                                (William Lee Irwin III)
> Parallel Scanning Patch                        (William Lee Irwin III)
> Reverse Mapping Patch #11b                     (Rik van Riel)
> IEEE-1394 fixes                                (Andrew Morton)
> Mini Low Latency Patch                         (Andrew Morton)
> Loopback Deadlock Fixes                        (Andrew Morton)
> Read Latency Fixes                             (Andrew Morton)
> Truncate Garbage Fixes                         (Andrew Morton)
> kGDB                                           (kgdb team)
> Zerocopy Pipes                                 (Manfred Spraul)
> Pollselect Fixes                               (Manfred Spraul)
> Jiffies wraparound fix                         (Tim Schmielau)
> RivaFB Software blanking                       (?)
> O(1) Scheduler                                 (Ingo Molnar)
> -O(1) 'sleep history' comment readability      (me)
> TUX linux kernel webserver                     (Ingo Molnar et al)

<snip to save bandwidth>
> --
> Daniel Robbins                                  <drobbins@gentoo.org>
> Chief Architect/President                       http://www.gentoo.org
> Gentoo Technologies, Inc.
>
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> gentoo-dev mailing list
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