Re: [gentoo-user] ~amd64 compatibility with modern cpus

[Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@googlemail.com>]

Am Freitag, 14. Dezember 2012, 11:18:21 schrieb felix@crowfix.com:
> Something went haywire with my 8 or 9 year old dual Opteron ~amd64 system
> last night.  I may have a bricked system.  I haven't given up yet, but I
> may have to buy a replacement system.  I have external USB drive backups,
> but the only other computer I have right now is an old Mac laptop which
> can't read Linux LVM partitions.
> 
> Questions:
> 
>     1.  I don't remember, and can't look up, the make.conf processor flags I
> emerge with.  But it is dual Opterons, and ~amd64.  How compatible could
> that be with modern Intel CPUs?  I know Intel adopted the extra registers
> of the AMD64 instruction set, but are there other differences which would
> prevent an Opteron system from running as is under an Intel processor? 
> Maybe AMD still sells Opterons, and I will be stuck with building a system.
> 
>     2.  Is it feasible to buy some commodity box, like from Dell, with an
> Intel processor, and plug in my two SATA SSD drives and get a console boot?
>  I don't give a fig right now about any GUI interface, and even Internet is
> not the problem.  If it will boot and run emerges, I can import the source
> files for X and Ethernet and other peripherals via USB stick.  But SATA
> drivers ...
> 
>     3.  My kernels always have just about every driver compiled in as
> modules, an old habit from when I used to swap in PCI cards like crazy.  I
> don't remember now how many SATA drivers are built in and how many are
> modules; if the commodity box needs SATA drivers which aren't built in,
> that could get tricky.  Are there boot command line options to preload
> certain modules?  Might not do me any good.  I think I could scrape by with
> USB modules, but not SATA.
> 
> For the curious, here is wat happened.  When I left off last night, the USB
> keyboard was only recognized when I unplugged all other USB devices, and
> the system hung at the grub point, with a blank screen.
> 
>     A reboot failed because it couldn't find the root=/dev/sde drive.  But
> the USB keyboard was working because I used it in grub to select a new
> 3.7.0 kernel (had been running 3.6.8).
> 
>     A second reboot ignored the USB keyboard and generated an ATA error I
> had never seen before for every ATA drive and some I don't have, all the
> way up to ATA13 before I rebooted it again.  I haven't got it to boot even
> this far since, so I can't regenerate that error.  There was a 5 second or
> so delay between these errors, making me think the ATAnn designator might
> not be different drives, just retries.
> 
>     It booted a rescue DVD, but without the keyboard it was kind of
> pointless, and it hung after showing two lines which I believe are
> unrelated other than a place marker (generating xxx key, generating RSA
> key).
> 
>     The keyboard wasn't even recognized by the BIOS.  I finally disconnected
> every USB device, all the ubs, and then the keyboard worked.
> 
>     But when I left it last night, it wouldn't even bring up the grub
> screen.  All the BIOS screens show the usual disk drives.
> 
> The system was working perfectly fine before all hell broke loose.  The
> keyboard was recognized during grub the first time, but after that only if
> all other USB devices were disconnected.  The disk drives acted funny
> during the boot, first with the unknown root- device error, then with the
> funky ATA errors, and finally with not even bringing up grub.
> 
> I will try some more desperate tricks today, like reconnecting the USB pile
> to see if it at least boots the disks again - is my choice between disks
> and keyboard?  I will find out.  My best guess right now is that booting
> 3.7.0 is what clobbered things; whether I added a option which loaded bad
> firmware, or 3.7.0 is broken, I have no idea.  It could well be something
> unrelated to 3.7.0.  My goal for today is to try to get keyboard and disk
> working, then boot with 3.6.8.

how about a more stable kernel - like 3.4.X?

and yes, a confused bios can do a lot of strange things. One thing you might 
try: disconnect your box from the main for several minutes, reset bios...

had to do that dance A LOT with a costly POS asus board...

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#163933