Thread: Boot without using "cpus=1"

Originally Posted by camerongray

Okay, just made a bit progress. I accidentally booted Mac OS with the drive set to "Native IDE" instead of "AHCI" and it boots with all 8 cores active if I don't specify "cpus=" However I now can't use "maxmem=6144" instead I have to go down to 2gb RAM, if I don't, 32bit apps like chrome don't open - I'll keep fiddling to see what I can do.

For your memory issue, made sure that you have the options arch=i386 and -force64 in your org.chameleon.Boot.plist...

For the crash od 32bit app, use this > amd patcher amd_insn_patcher - Downloads - OSx86.net

This seems to be a TSC synchronization issue. I have a Athlon II 620 which seems to exhibit this issue. It works fine on Leopard with the AnV kernel 9.8.0 but seems to be broken on 10.8.0 legacy/AnV kernels. Anyway I patched the 10.8.0 legacy/AnV kernel to synchronize the TSC's at boot and this made the problem go away. I'm running with all 4 cores enabled now for over 2 days and I have seen no crashes or lag or any of the other TSC related issues. If you have nForce LAN, please use version 0.64.5 since 0.64.6 will misbehave on SMP systems. I'm running Snow Leopard in 32-bit mode since I have legacy apps that won't work in 64-bit mode but the patch should work for 64-bit as well. If this is still an issue, let me know and I'll post the kernel.

Originally Posted by kyndder

For your memory issue, made sure that you have the options arch=i386 and -force64 in your org.chameleon.Boot.plist...

For the crash od 32bit app, use this > amd patcher amd_insn_patcher - Downloads - OSx86.net

I've never been able to get the amd_insn_patcher to work.
For TSC you could always use VoodooTSCSyncAMD.kext which comes in a zip file.
VoodooTSCSyncAMD kext - Free Download from megaupload - FilesTube.com

VoodooTSCSyncAMD is overkill for anything other than 8th generation AMD CPU's (Athlon64 X2 and friends). Anything later than that, for e.g. my Athlon II X4 620, don't have the TSC drift issue. I've observed that the TSC's need to be sync'd at boot and then they will not drift.

There's also a kernel patch for this issue on K8 series CPU's which is much more elegant. With VoodooTSCSyncAMD the actual TSC sync algorithm is very coarse. It relies on the IPI to run the code which updates the TSC on each processor. There is no guarantee on when the TSC will be sync'd.

Anyway, if it works for you, then more power to you.

Mine works just fine with out it.
Just something I ran across in my wanderings through the forums.