APIC blues with SMP kernel

[Wolfgang Gill]

On Mon, 24 May 2004 20:16:23 -0300, Andre Costa wrote
> Hi Wolfgang,
> 
> On Sun, 23 May 2004 23:36:45 +1000
> Wolfgang <wolfgang at rpi.net.au> wrote:
> 
> > > > My first suggestion would be to update your mother board BIOS.
> > > > There maybe there are some bugs in the APIC code in the BIOS. Or
> > > > change the APIC level from 1.4 to 1.1.
> > > 
> > > Mmmh... ok, I will try that -- I do recall seeing this on BIOS
> > > setup.
> > > 
> > > > I don't have any APIC problems with my servers, as I run Tyan MPX
> > > > mother boards, and have not seen APIC problems at all. I've run
> > > > RH9, FC1 & RHEL3 WS on these boards without any problems.
> > > 
> > > It should be something specific to my mobo then. Bad luck =(
> > > 
> > > Thks for the ideas,
> > > 
> > > Andre
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > Andre Oliveira da Costa
> > > 
> > That may very well be possible, as I had similar problems with MSI
> > Dual CPU Boards. So I decided to go for Tyan boards, and all the
> > problems went away.
> 
> My mobo is ABIT IIRC. I did set ACPI version to 1.1, and tried vanilla
> 2.4.26 SMP. It did last longer than RH 2188 SMP (the whole weekend, but
> with near-null load), but today it locked solid right after I logged 
> in and started to use it. Funny thing is that it still worked for a 
> while, but it seems that only while I requested apps that still were 
> in memory. As soon as I demanded data from the HD, the machine hung. 
> Could this be a HD spindown/wake-up problem?
> 
> I am now trying with HT disabled on BIOS, and with RH 2188 non-SMP
> kernel. It seems to be working fine, but only time will tell... Any
> ideas will be much appreciated, I am really disappointed I cannot use
> SMP with this machine... =/
> 
> TIA
> 
> Andre
> 
> -- 
> Andre Oliveira da Costa

I've had one of my IDE drives configured for spin-down, simply because it was
used for data backup. And it wasn't accessed all that often. But I have not
experianced any lockups. (Only a small pause, when the drive spun-up). 

I now run Hardware RAID (Adaptec), and the system is still running ok, no
lockups at all.

The other alternative would be to turn the APIC controller off completely. (In
some BIOSes you can do it there. Or just add the noapic command to the end of
your kernel line. Not sure of it's syntax as I don't use it)

Cheers,

Wolf
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