For once I'm glad I have a buggy motherboard

[rgviza]

Background:
I'm a crusty old computer guy. I've been installing and using red hat >groan< since about 1997. First just at home trying to figure out this thing called linux. I got pretty good at the whole red hat way of doing things with rpm, httpd etc and it paid off.

A couple of years later I jumped at a job to do php and java on linux for a bank. I was lucky enough to have a guy around that would show me the ropes on admin and other important stuff. I'm a developer so system security wasn't too big on my agenda. At that time I was focused on building things. When I got there we had a red hat 7 box (red hat 9 was out and this was way unpatched rofl) with a off the shelf "secure build" of apache running on it. A couple of years later the big ssl worm came around and I got my baptism by fire of building things from source. I had been experimenting on a development server with handbuilding and had great success working in features like GD and truetype, back when it was painful and there were no packages I also needed features like cURL/ssl the distro packagers were slacking on.

After that I only ran my LAMP/OpenSSL setups compiled from source. It's just easier. I didn't want to be waiting on a patch for a 0day for weeks like with that vendor (that shall remain unnamed) . I actually had to patch it the day fix was released or they were shutting us down that day. They told us that's how it was on the day we needed to fix it.

I noticed my httpds ran a lot better after that, and realized why. Ever since then I've always wanted to do a distro built from source by me but could never find the time.

This mobo I have wasn't running great with windows on it and after some digging I found out why. It's got some bug with SMP and APIC. irqpoll fixes it. I tried using the options recommended by everyone but nothing stabilized it, including noapic nolapic acpi=off irqpoll etc etc. I tried every permutation. The KP's weren't always fatal but they usually preceded wickedness.

Enter gentoo. I decided to try removing the offending modules from the kernel. 6 days into it I have a 64 bit system running rock solid on a custom kernel, buggy motherboard workaround in place with wine compiled from source, and my favorite game, eve online, running as good as it does on windows, at least for my purposes, and never really had to post for help once. The gentoo wiki is spectacular.

It's been up without KP for 4 days now. I've rebooted it but it was to reset the modules quickly. It boots rly fast too.

Says something about gentoo and all of you guys. This really is the only way to fly. I wish I hadn't been so lazy all this time . I've never had a red hat system dialed that fast with all my goodies on it.

-Viz

[micmac]

Thanks, you just made my day :)

[NathanZachary]

Glad to hear that you've had such a good experience. I also have a motherboard that is quite buggy, but I have been lazy as well. It could be that I'm not ambitious enough to tackle the problem though. I have an ASUS board that seems to run fine without any ACPI stuff enabled, except for one part: I can't use shutdown -h now. It will get to the "System halted," but won't actually shut off. I know that I could probably go through and correct the problem, but I'm a little nervous about doing so. Because of your post, I just might have to give it a go.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[McLink]

Gentoo is definitely awesome. I used to use Fedora myself, but I can't even describe how much better Gentoo is. I fell in love with Portage (still am ) and haven't seriously looked at other operating systems for everyday use since.

Glad Gentoo fixed your motherboard problems, too. That's one of the major bonuses of hand-tuning your kernel, I suppose.