[Cialug] Re: Slightly OT: AMD-V enabled laptops

[Nathan Stien]

On 10/31/07, Tim Wilson <tim_linux at wilson-home.com> wrote:
> My question is, does anyone know definitively if the Turion supports AMD-V
> technology?

I have two laptops with Turion x2s that both do hardware
virtualization, which I have verified by running Win XP under kvm.

<rant>
But I'll warn ye, stay away from the Toshiba Satellite A215-S7437.  We
just got one for my girlfriend the other day at Best Buy, and I've had
no end of trouble getting stuff to work in Ubuntu Gutsy.

It has a sticker on the outside that says "Realtek Wireless", but the
driver from support.toshiba.com says Atheros and is Vista-only (so no
ndiswrapper).  The PCI ID it reports under lspci turns up pretty much
nothing on google.  "Unknown device".  Madwifi does not recognize it.
I have considered trying to force the PCI ID into the source and
rebuilding, if I get sufficiently desperate.

The sound (SBx00 Azalia) doesn't work either, but I still have a
couple things to try (such as trying latest alsa from source, blah).

Suspend to RAM and hibernate do not work.  Crashville.  Sometimes the
machine just stalls while I'm typing in a terminal and stays hung for
minutes.  I've found that tapping the power button can sometimes wake
it from its coma.

I get a lot of odd dmesg spam about APIC errors.  I've been using
irqpoll and noapic as kernel boot parameters, and this has cut it down
a bit.  But the thing is still fairly flaky.
</rant>

The video is ATI X1200, which works well enough under ATI's
proprietary driver.  That was a bright spot at least.

Anyways, I mainly just had to vent my linux rage at a crowd who would
know what I was talking about.   ;-)

- Nathan