Power Management problems on 440GX chipset

[dementia13]

Hi, all. I'm running Fedora Core 2 on an old Tyan Thunder 100 motherboard with dual PIII 600 CPUs. This is a P2-era motherboard which doesn't support ACPI. I have power management set in the BIOS to APM, and I have acpid disabled. My system will freeze once every day or two. It gives an error message like, "NMI received on CPU (0 or 1, it alternates) for unknown reason. Do you have a strange power-saving mode enabled? Uh-huh....Dazed and confused, but trying to continue". It repeats, alternating CPUs, until I reboot the machine. Any ideas on what I need to configure/enable/kill to get this behavior to stop?

[dementia13]

OK, found it. The message about "power-saving mode" threw me off: it's not really necessarily a power-management issue, but it's an issue with the 440GX chipset. I found some advice to pass "nmi_watchdog=1" to the kernel, and now I've been stable for days. Errr, there was a fresh reinstall in there too...but I think the kernel parameter is what did the trick.