Linux crashes on Geode board

Apr 05, 2004 3 Replies
A

Hey folks,



I just started another project with the Geode on an Acrosser AR-B1552 (because I like driving nails into my eyes and using semi-supported processors in Linux) and installed Fedora Core 1 on it. It installed just fine after a bit of tweaking, but well, the board doesn't work too well.



It passes Memtest86, but when I was using the hard drive (before I went to booting off the network and using a Root-NFS), the kernel would panic and crash under heavy file operations (cp'ing or tar'ing). I also can't leave the thing on overnight with Opera running under TWM on news.google.com without the entire thing locking up.



I'm using the XFree86 4.3 and followed all of Lewin Edwards instructions on at

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to get that working. I get a pile of warnings from the nsc.o driver when XFree86 starts, but with acceleration off, everything appears to work fine until it just hangs a few hours after I go to bed,



The Fedora Core 1 kernel is 2.4.22, so there shouldn't be any problems with that.



This is interesting compared to my old project, which has Acrosser AR-B1551s running Xfbdev on a kernel framebuffer with kernel version



2.4.20.
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That one had no problems.

I'm going to try a different board and RAM, but I was wondering if anyone had any other experiences running Fedora Core 1 on it and any problems with it.



Thanks guys,



Alex


Alex Pavloff - remove BLAH to email Software Engineer, ESA Technology
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J

Hi Alex, after compiling the nsc-geode framebuffer driver (2.7.7) into kernel 2.4.20 my linux run also very instable. A look into readme-kfb-2.7.7.txt told me that the driver was tested with 2.4.17 (and may not work with other kernel versions). I compiled again with 2.4.17 and until now didn't crash :-)

Best regards, Juergen

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A

I'm trying to avoid using the kernel framebuffer this time around and stick with stock kernels as much as possible. The main reason I used the framebuffer last time was the constraint to fit on a 32MB Flash -- and with the framebuffer I could use the kdrive/XFbdev. No such limitation this time, so I'm trying to stick to Fedora Core 1 as much as possible.

Alex Pavloff - remove BLAH to email Software Engineer, ESA Technology
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B

Hmm....was X running when you where running the cp | tar? If so, I think you've got a flaky video driver or card?

If you weren't running any video when those problems happened, then are you sure....really sure that you don't have a bum motherboard/cpu. Perhaps failing because of heat problems?

-Barry

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