Hard Lock with Fedora Core 1

[Doug Brott]

Phil Schaffner wrote:

>We have recently been experiencing problems with hard lock of FC1 on
>three different dual processor machines - 2 Athlon MP and one Intel
>P-III.  All have various flavors of NVidia cards.
>
>The machine I am currently on is probably the worst offender - has been
>locking up about every 1.5 days for the last 2 weeks.  Can't find
>anything in logs after reboot.  Just freezes as described - can't get
>any keyboard/mouse response (including ctrl-alt-Fx, ctrl-alt-bksp,
>ctrl-alt-del), nor login over the net.
>
>Just turned on the kernel.sysrq = 1 in /etc/sysctl.conf and added
>nmi_watchdog=1 to grub as suggested earlier in the thread.
>
>Some info...
>
>[root at radar0 1.90]# cat /boot/grub/grub.conf
># grub.conf generated by anaconda
>#
># Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
>#boot=/dev/sda
>default=0
>timeout=10
>splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
>password --md5 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
># NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition (sdb1).  This means that
>#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
>#          root (hd1,0)
>#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sdb5
>#          initrd /initrd-version.img
>title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2174.nptl_37.rhfc1.atsmp)
>        root (hd1,0)
>        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl_37.rhfc1.atsmp ro root=/dev/sdb5 noapic nmi_watchdog=1
>        initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl_37.rhfc1.atsmp.img
>...
>  
>
I added the following two options to my boot line in grub.conf

apm=off acpi=off

Also, I disabled ACPI in the bios.  This only became a problem for me 
with Fedora, I never had the problem with RedHat 9.0.
I also had noapic set in earlier versions of Fedora Core Kernel, but I 
have removed this option -  it might actually be deprecated.

Prior to this change, I was experiencing a hard-lock about once a day on 
average.  Now, it runs without any lockups.  This should only be an 
issue on Dual CPU systems.  Single CPU systems will not be affected 
either way with this change.  I have an AMD Athlon and can in no way 
vouch for whether or not this works on the Intel based system.

-- 
Doug Brott
brott at redh.com