Jamie Zawinski
DANGER: hard core geekery ahead! I don't make fun of hippies or drunk people at all in this entry.
So, while we were testing some things trying to figure out how to recover the motherboard with the scorched BIOS, I accidentally typed ``shutdown'' at the wrong machine: I shut down the machine in colo (the mp3 server.) I lost all of my sysadmin cred with that one (if I ever had any to begin with) and we had to get Tom to let us in to colo to try and fix it.
There are three machines involved, all of which are VA Linux FullOn 2230s, with Intel L440GX+ motherboards. Two of the machines are at the club (the MP3 encoder, and the RealVideo encoder) and the third is in colo (the MP3 server that the outside world connects to.) Here's what we've learned:
- Linux will run fine on these mobos with any processor available
(500MHz, 700MHz, or 1GHz), alone or in pairs.
- BIOS 9.something and 10.something work fine with
500MHz and 700MHz CPUs, alone or in pairs.
- BIOS 9.something and 10.something freak slightly
when confronted with 1GHz CPUs: the BIOS doesn't know what to make of
it, and pauses waiting for you to type F1 before continuing. (But
after that, it will boot, and Linux works fine.)
- BIOS 14.3 (build 133, the latest release) freaks hard
when confronted with either 700MHz or 1GHz CPUs: it says something to
the effect of, ``CPU not compatible with mainboard revision.'' After
that, it won't boot at all. That's right, upgrading the BIOS
makes it no longer able to boot the 700MHz CPUs (which it previously
had no complaints about whatsoever), and likewise unable to boot the
1GHz CPUs, which it would previously grudgingly tolerate. This
despite the fact that the
release notes say that 1GHz CPUs have been supported since 13.0.
(Our mainboard version numbers are recent enough, according to the
relnotes.)
- Intel's BIOS upgrader software will not let you make a backup of
the previous BIOS version so that you can back out the change:
apparently the BIOS is locked as write-only. (Incidentally, the BIOS
NVRAM is surface-mounted, not in a socket.)
- BIOSes older than 14.x are not available for download
anywhere.
We could not find any way to get a 1GHz chip to boot unattended; we could not find any way to get any chip but a 500MHz to work on a mobo whose BIOS had been upgraded; nor could we find any way to downgrade the BIOS. Fuck you very much, Intel.
So, we had three machines, five motherboards with various BIOSes on them, nine CPUs of various flavors, and a jigsaw puzzle of an evening ahead of us. One of the motherboards had a corrupted BIOS, and another of the motherboards has a dead SCSI controller.
We spent a long time trying to un-scorch the dead BIOS to no avail; and we considered switching to IDE disks for the one without a SCSI controller. But to make a long and tortuous story short, here's what we ended up with:
| Machine: | Last week: | Desired: | Actual: | ||||
| MP3 Encoder, club | 2 x 500MHz | 2 x 700MHz | 2 x 500MHz | ||||
| Real Encoder, club | 1 x 700MHz | 2 x 500MHz | 2 x 1GHz (must type F1 to reboot) | ||||
| MP3 Server, colo | 1 x 700MHz | 2 x 1GHz | 2 x 500MHz |
We could have gotten the 2x1GHz CPUs onto the MP3 Server as originally intended, except then I would have had to go to colo to reboot it, so we made the ``have to type F1'' machine be at the club.
It turns out that RealEncoder will work on a 2x700MHz machine, or on a 1x700MHz machine, but not on a 2x500MHz machine. In hindsight, this makes a kind of sick sense, if you assume that the single RealEncoder process requires (say) a dedicated 600MHz to work properly. When we had 2x500MHz in there, I imagine that what was going on was that one of the CPUs was overloaded, and the other was mostly idle.
It remains to be seen whether 2x500 is better than 1x700 for the MP3 Server machine. I suspect it will be, since there are many load-ful processes running on it. But it still remains to be seen whether load was the cause of the ``chipmunk'' problem at all.
If any of you have any suggestions as to how to get an L440GX+ to
work with a 1GHz Pentium III