Showstopper -- install panic in IDE CDRom driver with Mistumi FX drive

[Jeff Vian]

On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 22:27 -0400, John DeDourek wrote:
> Basically, we have a bunch of lab machines that we would like to upgrade 
> to FC3.
> Unfortunately, the install kernel panics on attempting access to the 
> CDRom.  This
> appears to be basically a Kernel 2.6 problem and therefore we can 
> install neither
> FC2 nor FC3 on these machines.  In any case, the announcement was just 
> posted
> that FC2 was moving to legacy in the near future.
> 
> The bug is well described in Bugzilla #115458 at
>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=115458
> The likelyhood is that this appears on older, slow hardware where the CDRom
> access times out and the error recovery panics the kernel.
> 
> Does anyone have a workaround for this that will get these machines 
> installed?
> It's an isolated lab (networking experimentation) so is generally not 
> linked to the
> campus network; therefore a network install is not an easy option; 
> busides, we
> suspect that we would panic anytime the CDRom was accessed under the running
> kernel as well.
> 
> We have tried using hdc=ide-scsi ... this does get past the crash in the 
> installation,
> but then Anaconda can't find the installation CD.  (Possibly looking at 
> a link to /dev/hdc
> instead of to the appropriate SCSI drive?)
> 
> The Bugzilla description has an analysis of the stack trace by Alan 
> Cox.  But I'm afraid
> thate we're not yet experienced enough here to understand how to use 
> that information
> to locate the apparent kernel bug.
> 
> Any help or pointers would be appreciated.
> 
This may be helped by adding ide=nodma to the boot line, and also maybe
by installing in text mode.