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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Sorry again perry, I just re-booted to try your idea, I have oe of those low end BOISs with no options for performance tweaking, I reset the defaults anyways, but it didn't help
I also tried ide=nodma on the off chance that that would help... booted faster, but still with the stops.

truthfatal:
Now I'm curious - have you tried any other distributions on this box? If so, do they exhibit the same problem? I would recommend trying (probably) Gentoo in this case, as (I think) they use a "closer to vanilla" kernel than some others (but I may be wrong); perhaps one of the Slackware derivatives would be a good choice to try too. If one of the others works fine, then run a diff on the kernel configs and start looking for likely suspects (feel free to post the diff here).

Sorry again perry, I just re-booted to try your idea, I have oe of those low end BOISs with no options for performance tweaking, I reset the defaults anyways, but it didn't help
I also tried ide=nodma on the off chance that that would help... booted faster, but still with the stops.

I bet you any money those processors are burning thru the motherboard. Have you contacted the manufacture to see if anyone else is having trouble with erratic behavior, a sure sign things aren't up to their best.

I'm actually in the process of burning a KateOS liveCD (just finished Zenwalk and Gentoo disks, I think I'll give my CPUs a rest after that.

hwmon is detecting my processors at ~55 Celsius after about 45 minutes straight at about half throttle.
I do have frequency scaling enabled so they throttle down to 800Mhz each when idle. also, I keep my laptop actually on my lap (at the moment, not always)and I'm not noticing any significant warmth coming off of this thing.
(when I'm not working the machine 'hard' my cputemp is usually around 30 degrees... which doesn't seem that excessive for a notebook.)

I'll definitely look into my hardware as a source of my issue.

Last edited by truthfatal; 09-11-2007 at 12:15 PM.
Reason: s/cpufreqd/hwmon

Okay, I talked again with PiterPunk - it seems that one of the power-saving options in the kernel (for Intel chipsets) caused some breakage on some AMD chipsets. Try passing "idle=poll" to the kernel and see if that makes a difference.

wow, apparently the first time I read this I didn`t see the "l"
so I did ide=poll instead of idle=poll

I know what that is like... it has nothing to do with Linux. It wouldn't matter if you had Windows installed either.

It's your Bios! You got your system setup for high performance or something similar. Go back and change your Bios to either default settings or something much more reserved.

Ran into the same problem two weeks ago when a failed Lilo re-write took out my Cmos settings. Spent a week trying to get it figured out only to find out that just the default/basic settings in the Bios stopped the *eratic* behaviour that my formerly working Linux install was exhibiting.

Bet you any money you've got your Bios setup for high performance! Check out the web for other owners of your machine possibily having similiar problems!

- Perry

Yeah, I've been troubleshooting similar problems for months.

I have to pass noapic nolapic_timer to the kernel. My understanding of the issue is that there's currently an SMP bug when using a 32bit mode kernel on a 64bit processor. however, all information on this seems to have vanished out of google. In fact, I can find almost no references to Toshiba A215-S4807s running linux at all now. I can trigger the same problem in the most current kernel. It would be great if it's a performance bug, but my BIOS doesn't have those settings. I believe it to be an IOAPIC / interrupt bug.