Re: HELP: Fedora 5 causes kernel to always freeze!

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 22:17 +0300, Georgios Petasis wrote:
  

Dear Fedora users,

I have an AMD-64 system which I have 32-bit fedora installed. The
system was working
perfectly with fedora core 4. When core 5 was released, I upgraded
again to the 32-bit version.
Since day one, I experienced random freezes. So, I did a clean install
of 32-bit core 5.
The freezes didn't stop. I get them so frequently, that it is
impossible to work with the system.

My system is in this state quite many months now (this means that I
don't use it at all). I have tried 
to ask for help in this list on how to debug the freezes, but with no
results.
Of course I have tried to check my hardware, so I did a memtest86
check on memory and a SMART
check on my (only) disk. I even changed the graphics card. No hardware
errors have been found but the
problem persisted.

Today, I came across a kernel boot argument that can help debug such
freezes nmi_watchdog=1. So,
I booted my system with this option, and I haven't yet got a freeze
(so I added permenantly in my grub.conf :-))
Looking in the output of dmesg, I can see strange entries, like the
one at the end of this mail.
Is there a problem with the cpuspeed process? Is it safe to disable
it? What is its job?
Is there anything I can set in my BIOS to prevent this?
Finally, is it a bug that should be reported somewhere? (I have never
reported a bug using bugzilla :-))

Any help will be welcomed :-)

Regards,

George

<snip>
    

Hi George, 

What motherboard are you using ? I used to have a Abit motherboard that
would do that to me at least once a day and had to be rebooted. Turned
out to be a capacitor problem -- the original motherboard had a flaw
which was that an under-rated capacitor was being used. This was
reported on some message boards, and there were 2 solutions: send the
board back to the manufacturer or replace the capacitor with another
that had the recommended rating. 

Anyway, the frustrating thing was that you could not predict the
freezes, and on Windows, it worked fine (unless you started Photoshop).

You may want to check the message boards for your motherboard.

I am using an Nvidia motherboard, K8NGM2-FID, from MSI (the ONLY brand I
use now), with an Athlon AMD64 and running 64-bit FC5 with no problems
so far. 

Regards,