[Bug 7479] Occasional lockup at boot on nforce2, XP3000+, 1.5 GB system, occurs 10-30 % of time at bootups

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------- Additional Comments From alankila at bel.fi  2005-03-18 09:38 UTC -------
Okay, a week has passed and I haven't been able to observe this crash happening
again.

I believe this is because I made several changes to my system on the day I
reported this. Firstly, I enabled the option "FSB Spread Spectrum" and set it to
0.5 % because I noticed that this was a default setting in BIOS and it had
become lost at some point. I have kept a PS/2 keyboard attached, and I removed
one Towitoko card reader from system (which used to be stuck on the PS/2 port
because it is meant to prevent keypresses reaching the main computer when the
user is inputting a PIN code). And of course kernel version itself changed
lately from -4 to -5.

I can still lose my USB keyboard at forced reboots (such as pressing the reset
button), but the attached PS/2 allows me to boot into Linux and then Linux
reawakens it. I consider this an excellent remedy, and that's good enough for
now. This here must indeed be a BIOS bug and there's nothing Linux can do about
it. :-/

Despite I can't make the on-boot memtest show any errors, I have some suspicions
now that my crashes could have been related to some internal electromagnetic
noise in the system that the new FSB setting may be mitigating. Perhaps some AGP
or HD activity is required before it will show up, or something. I wonder if
anyone has made a memtest that would stress the system overall, such as running
heavy OpenGL with system-memory textures through AGP port and doing plenty of
disk reads meanwhile. (Sounds like DOOM3 combined with memtest and bonnie++ in a
loop on the background to me. I might even give this a try for a few hours some
day.)

I'll report if the crashes appear again.

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