[ale] New box (happy birthday to me)

[Scott Castaline]

JK wrote:
> I built the 8GB Phenom box I mentioned in the "Virtualization"
> thread, and yeah, it seems to handle the guests a lot more
> smoothly than did the P4 machine I wrote about earlier :-)
> 
Nice box, happy B'day

> Some flakiness, though, which I've googled about with not much
> luck:
> 
> * The BIOS says "Installed RAM: 8192MB  Usable: 6911 MB".
> Where is 1281MB going?  The Linux kernel also sees only 6911MB.
> 
> * Always at boot the Linux kernel says something like: "You
> have no RAM aperture, please enable IOMMU in the BIOS". However,
> there doesn't seem to be any such BIOS option. (Motherboard is
> an ASUS M3N78, BIOS is Phoenix/Award.)
> 
I get the same thing. I have a Gig-a-byte MoBo with an AMD x2 chip and 4 
GB RAM. It'll also say something like that it is going to use the top 
64MB of RAM making it unavailable to the OS I had read somewhere that 
this has something to do with video frame-buffer, but I can't seem to 
find anything that directly addresses the IOMMU BIOS option at either 
Gig-A-Byte or AMD since the MoBo has AMD chipset.

> * Often at boot time the Linux kernel says "Unable to enumerate
> devices on USB interface 3". When this happens the machine
> usually hangs with a black screen :-(  (And no ctl-alt-f1 console
> joy, either.) If it gets past this point, though, it boots fine
> (into Ubuntu Intrepid AMD64 desktop).
> 
I'll get this error too, although mine has never hung. Haven't been able 
to find anything on that one.

> I'm running without any overclocking; all BIOS settings are
> "standard" or "safe".
> 
> I wonder if I need to RMA this motherboard?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- JK
>