History
I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor. If I boot into Snow Leopard as is, I get EXC_I386_DIV crashes across my entire system after a few hours. If I boot with the
cpus=1 kernel flag, I do not receive the crashes but I lose my second core, of course. When I booted with both cores enabled, I saw a message in my kernel log saying I had an unsynchronized TSC (time stamp counter) so I deduced that that was the cause of my crashes. And it made sense since only after a few hours could the TSC become so unsynchronized so as to cause crashes (I don't know the specifics.). After I discovered this, I found the VoodooTSCSync project (
http://code.google.com/p/voodootscsync/). I tried it and it synchronized my TSC at boot but I still got crashes! Then I realized that I needed my TSC to be synchronized constantly, just like the AMD Dual-Core Optimizer does for Windows users. So I took the VoodooTSCSync project and turned it into VoodooTSCSyncAMD.
What it does
VoodooTSCSyncAMD is basically AMD Dual-Core Optimizer for the Mac OS. It synchronizes the TSC across all processor cores every 10 seconds. This is for Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Opteron (first-generation and second-generation), Sempron X2, and Turion 64 X2. VoodooTSCSyncAMD is essential to prevent EXC_I386_DIV crashes on these processors, as well as problems with Adobe Flash Player, and system lag after a few hours. I would like to thank the original creators of VoodooTSCSync for their efforts.