Re: [cooker-amd64] Dual Opteron hangs in openoffice

[Martin Johnson]

Hi,

I was running apache2 but that wasn't the problem, even if I stopped all 
the daemons it still hung. 

I have found the solution though, it seems that the Tyan BIOS doen't 
implement errata 94 for the opteron b3 revision.

Here is the errata description:

"On an instruction cache miss, the sequential prefetch mechanism may 
enable the early prefetch of the next sequential cache line. Under a highly 
specific set of internal pipeline conditions this mechanism may cause the 
processor to hang or execute incorrect code in 64-bit systems running 
32-bit compatibility mode applications.
Potential Effect on System
Processor may deadlock or execute incorrect code. 
Suggested Workaround 
BIOS should disable IC sequential prefetch by setting 
IC_CFG.DIS_SEQ_PREFETCH (bit 11 of MSR C001_1021)."

Looks like ooo creates the "highly specific set of conditions" necessary 
to crash my box.

Anyway, setting bit 11 of msr c0011021 fixes it.

If anybody wants to know how to do this, let me know, I don't think I 
should post it though :)

Tyan should really read the documentation!!!

Thanks,

Martin

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 07:54:26AM +0100, Gwenole Beauchesne wrote: > Hi,
> 
> >If I start oowriter and then press the uparrow key and keep it pressed,
> >within 30 seconds the entire machine locks up hard, no oops, nothing. 
> >The
> >NMI watchdog doesn't even trip (though I'm not convinced that works
> >anyway). The hang is 100% repeatable on my hardware.
> 
> Do you have apache2 running? There is a similar pb on ia32.
> 
> Bye,
> Gwenole.
> 

-- 
Dr. M.Johnson,                                 M.J.Johnson@massey.ac.nz
IIMS - Computer Science,                 http://cs-alb-pc3.massey.ac.nz
Massey University Albany,
Auckland, New Zealand.