I tried to make a small upgrade on my old desktop, having Intel Core2Duo E4500, MSI G41M-P33 Combo motherboard (Socket 775) and 3GB DDR2 with a dual boot setup of Fedora 23 and Windows 7. I found the below mentioned article, and decided to give it a try.
It is reported that, old (cheap!) Xeon processors designed for socket 771 can be installed in socket 775 motherboards like mine, with the help of a small adapter. After thorough searching, I ordered a Xeon E5440 from a Chinese website.
The processor arrived yesterday and I replaced the Core2Duo with the Xeon and a new heat sink. As explained in the above said article, I modified the bios with necessary micocodes and flashed it. Bios reported name and make of the Xeon correctly, and then I managed to boot up windows 7. Everything is fine, Windows detected the Xeon and there is a clear speed improvement. I did some parallel performance evaluations, where I got more than 2.5 times faster results compared with C2D. The temperature levels are a bit high, but still in the admissible levels.
So, everything was great, until I decided to check the situation in Fedora. Just after the grub screen, it starts to lag. It took more than 10min to reach the 'Welcome to Fedora 23' text and the booting took more than 30 minutes. The system is very slow, non-responsive sometimes, hangs, ...... not usable at all! I cant figure out what is wrong. I tried to boot from fedora 24 live medium, but the condition is more worse. It took more than 2 hours to boot. The log of dmesg is all I could get, and is attached. Meanwhile, windows 7 is running without any issues.
The current kernel for Fedora 24 seems to be 4.9.10-100.fc24 (REF: http://mirror.nodesdirect.com/fedora/updates/24/x86_64/k/ ), you have Fedora 23 but with 4.5.5-300.fc24
how did you get into that unusual kernel situation? It looks like you modified the yum/dnf configuration to pull fc24 kernels onto your fc23, but then you changed something so it
quit doing that so it's not up to the latest 24 kernel which is 4.9.10-100 ?
Fedora 23 is way back on 4.8.13-100.fc23 (REF: http://mirror.nodesdirect.com/fedora...s/23/x86_64/k/ )
Sorry, I made a small confusion. The dmsg log I obtained is from the Fedora24 live medium, not my Fedora23 installation. The FC23 no longer boots, it ends up in the dracut emergency shell. I cant find a way to save the rdsosreport.txt file since the USB drive is not listed in /dev.
Actually, I am ready to format everything and do a fresh install. But, why the live medium also laggy?
Have you been through the 'not working as expected' troubleshooting steps on the adaptor's website?
If so and no help, on first inspection it's evident there may be a resultant CPU microcode issue, possibly as a result of the modified BIOS not being able to deliver a specific value the linux kernels expect. if you don't use hardware virtualisation try setting VT-d off in BIOS and see if it makes any difference with the live media. you can always reverse that setting if you do use hardware virtualisation.
also if you do need to use VT-d on, try adding the following to the kernel boot command:
The kernel definitely doesn't like your cpu very much in its current configuration.
Does the recovery kernel work better?
Maybe it is microcode related, who knows? (http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-7...e-83/#comments)
Also, this looks like a very ugly (though fun) hack and I wouldn't be surprised if the manufacturers of the adapter only tested this with Windows.
This tells me this hack is a bit hit or miss: https://encrypted.google.com/search?...=en&filter=0&*
Thanks for sharing your thoughts antikythera and Dutchy.
Originally Posted by Dutchy
The kernel definitely doesn't like your cpu very much in its current configuration. Does the recovery kernel work better?
I tried. It doesn't work.
Originally Posted by antikythera
if you don't use hardware virtualisation try setting VT-d off in BIOS and see if it makes any difference with the live media.
I disabled the 'Intel (R) Virtualization Tech' option in Bios. But no change is observed.
Have you been through the 'not working as expected' troubleshooting steps on the adaptor's website?
No. Sorry to say that. I have been searching everywhere and somehow missed the 'not working as expected' section in that article. Quoting their words,
If your system is still unstable or seems very slow, try disabling the power saving features in your BIOS.
The power saving features like Speedstep (aka EIST) and C-States (C1E and others) may not be working correctly with your motherboard, and it could be causing your processor to run at its minimum speed or causing instability. You should try disabling them to see if it helps.
I disabled 'Intel C-STATE' and at last there it is. Everything back to normal! I removed fc23 and installed FC24 which is running smooth and good.
Thanks everyone for guiding me out. Even though it look a bit ugly as Dutchy pointed out, in my opinion, this cheap hack definitely provide extra lifetime to old slow desktops like mine.
Motherboard might need a bios update? It reports the Xeon processor but might still have a problem with the newer processor that's been fixed in a newer bios update