trico
April 28th, 2005, 09:24 PM
I've had a long history of freezes with Ubuntu. The freeze would usually occur after the system was left on overnight. When I would try to do something with it the next day it would would perform verrrry slooowwwllly. Shutting down would happen eventually, but it would take at least 20 minutes, perhaps longer.
My system has the 2.4 ghz hyper-threading cpu. It made no difference if I was using an SMP kernel or not. Or if I had hyper threading enabled in the bios or not. I thought it had something to do with the drivers Ubuntu was using but was wrong. I loaded another distribution onto the system and had the same problem.
I went looking for a BIOS update and found that IBM had posted a new one a while back and in the list of things it fixes, there is a mention of possible problems with some Intel CPUs and a new microcode load for the CPU to fix it.
To cut a very long story short - the problem was with the bios/intel cpu. I downloaded the Bios, installed it and have had no problem since. I've re-enabled hyperthreading in the bios and am now happily using the SMP kernel. No more system freezes.
trico
PS: I'm sure there's a better place for this post but after reading through the descriptions of the various fora I haven't a clue where it belongs. I don't seem to be able to post to the message threads where I first described the problem. So I'll leave it to the powers that be in ubuntu-land to move this to wherever it belongs.
PPS: I have XP on the same system and it appears to not be sensitive to the problem. Interesting...
My system has the 2.4 ghz hyper-threading cpu. It made no difference if I was using an SMP kernel or not. Or if I had hyper threading enabled in the bios or not. I thought it had something to do with the drivers Ubuntu was using but was wrong. I loaded another distribution onto the system and had the same problem.
I went looking for a BIOS update and found that IBM had posted a new one a while back and in the list of things it fixes, there is a mention of possible problems with some Intel CPUs and a new microcode load for the CPU to fix it.
To cut a very long story short - the problem was with the bios/intel cpu. I downloaded the Bios, installed it and have had no problem since. I've re-enabled hyperthreading in the bios and am now happily using the SMP kernel. No more system freezes.
trico
PS: I'm sure there's a better place for this post but after reading through the descriptions of the various fora I haven't a clue where it belongs. I don't seem to be able to post to the message threads where I first described the problem. So I'll leave it to the powers that be in ubuntu-land to move this to wherever it belongs.
PPS: I have XP on the same system and it appears to not be sensitive to the problem. Interesting...