[debian-knoppix] Pentium 4 Hyperthreading and knoppix-installer bug?
Hi All:
After searching the Knoppix forum for the needed information,
the latest Knoppix CD (2003-07-26) runs near-perfectly on my
new Gateway 700X computer (hardware list below). It even detects
the Pentium 4 Hyperthreading feature (two Tuxen on the boot screen !).
The live CD boot options are
knoppix idebus=66 dma wheelmouse alsa
This works great with one tweak and one "blemish":
1. The Zip drive is associated with /dev/sda , which does not work.
It should be /dev/sda4.
2. The Zip drive gets detected twice: once as "hda", with lots
of error messages about illegal requests and not being able to
read the partition table, and once as /dev/sda, see above. (The
hard disk is detected as "hde".)
The new hard disk installer (knoppix-installer) to "hde" works
fine, but there are some issues:
3. When requesting to write the MBR, it is done to "hda", which
fails (of course).
4. Sound does not work (minor issue), but does after running
/etc/init.d/alsa-config .
Unfortunately, then the system does not boot anymore. The
computer hangs just before/halfway in the message
cleaning /tmp /var/lock /var/run
Trying to live without sound does not work either. After reinstalling,
and noticing that the (integrated) NIC card has not been configured, running
netcardconfig
(which works) results again in an unbootable system (same symptoms as
before).
This appears to be an SMP/Hyperthreading issue: after disabling
hyperthreading in the BIOS, it boots up again, and works great.
I have no idea whether I pay a penalty for disabling hyperthreading,
it is still blazingly fast: in octave (with the optimized BLAS and
LAPACK libraries), multiplying two 1000x1000 matrices takes 1.05
seconds (3.95 seconds on a P3 700MHz computer). Using "nosmp"
in the knoppix boot options does not work: the message is "lost
interupt on hde", repeated quite a few times (indefinitely?) and
nothing (else) happens.
Point 4 applies to knx-hdinstall as well, point 3 does not.
Obviously, disabling hyperthreading is not the solution to the
problem, but that is the limit of my expertise.
Thanks for a great system!
Paul Eggermont
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The hardware
Gateway 700X
3.06 GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading,
a serial ATA hard disk (160 GB--what do you do with so much space?)
CD-R/W, CD-ROM, and a ZIP 750 MB drive,
Soundblaster Audigy
nVIDIA GeForce Ti4200
NIC card (integrated)
USB optical wheelmouse
flat panel display (Gateway FPD 1730)
I believe the chipset is Intel 875P.
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