[ 0.200001] ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO

English Install/Boot/Login
#1 
0.200001] ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC

This is the first thing displayed when I boot openSuse (specs in SIG below)

I have not noticed any catastrophic ill-effects, but am curious as to what this actually means, and whether I should or could do anything about it?

Googling about brings some ideas from gentoo and ubuntu, but seem to be mainly related to Intel dual-cores and older linux kernels. I guess openSuse notices the “problem” and works around, in my case pretty much successfully.
Suggestions from other places usually advise adding
NOAPIC or similar to the boot options, I don’t want to disable some functionality, if the “bug” is not actually causing any problems…
As I say, I’m just curious.

[Edit]

This follows in the dmesg:

[0.200001] ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC                                                                                      
    0.200001] ...trying to set up timer (IRQ0) through the 8259A ...                                                                                  
    0.200001] ..... (found apic 0 pin 0) ...                                                                                                          
    0.242373] ....... works.
#2

On 01/13/2010 06:56 AM, wakou wrote:
>
> 0.200001] …MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
>
> This is the first thing displayed when I boot openSuse (specs in SIG
> below)
>
> I have not noticed any catastrophic ill-effects, but am curious as to
> what this actually means, and whether I should or could do anything
> about it?
>
> Googling about brings some ideas from gentoo and ubuntu, but seem to be
> mainly related to Intel dual-cores and older linux kernels. I guess
> openSuse notices the “problem” and works around, in my case pretty much
> successfully.
> Suggestions from other places usually advise adding
> NOAPIC or similar to the boot options, I don’t want to disable some
> functionality, if the “bug” is not actually causing any problems…
> As I say, I’m just curious.

This is a no-harm, no-foul kind of message. The message is there in case there
is a problem later. As you see no ill effects, it is safe to ignore it. I don’t
know anything about this particular hardware, but it is likely that a workaround
has been employed. After all, AMD is very active in Linux development.