APIC on AMD Athlon 2500+ Broken?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 10:01:10AM -0400, Kareem Shehata wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> I guess I've been pretty dormant of late as a result of not having a
> working Linux desktop.  Now that I've finally gotten a kernel build that
> doesn't crash, I should be a little more active.
> 
> Here's the strange part:  what was causing my system to lock up solid
> was APIC support.  Any kernel that I've run with APIC enabled will crash
> after what seems like a random period of time no matter what devices are
> in use.  The system is now running just fine, but I figured APIC would
> help improve stability and performance.  Is this a known bug in either
> the kernel or my hardware (Asus A7N8X Deluxe with an Athlon XP 2500+),
> or do I simply have a crappy chip?

In my experience, your best bet on the nforce2 chipset is to turn off
the APIC in the bios, no matter what OS you run (it causes sound
choppiness in XP for example, and yeah linux can lock up with it too).
It seems not to matter which board maker it is, it seems to just be a
not too reliable APIC implementation in an otherwise excelent chipset.
Not as if the APIC is a big deal to have on a single cpu system.

I have an A7N8X-E-DX at work, which is running great with 2.6 kernels,
and I am 99% sure I turned of the APIC in the bios when we got the
machine because I know what it did to XP on the A7N8X-DX boards.

Lennart Sorensen
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