SMP boot problems with RHEL AS3

Benjamin Hornberger bho at gmx.net
Fri Jul 16 18:00:05 UTC 2004


Thanks a lot for your help! But what is apic?? Sorry for my lack of 
knowledge...

Thanks,
Benjamin

At 10:56 AM 7/16/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>Benjamin Hornberger wrote:
>>Hi all,
>>I am having strange problem with RHEL AS3 on a dual-processor machine. 
>>When I boot the SMP kernel, the machine hangs during boot, but, if I am 
>>patient, after ca. 30 minutes finally comes up. When I boot the non-SMP 
>>kernel, it comes up ok (also waiting ca. 15 sec at the same point in the 
>>boot sequence).
>>Below is a cutout of the boot messages for the SMP kernel before it 
>>hangs, and the corresponding part of the non-SMP boot (don't laugh -- I 
>>took snapshots with a Digicam and typed it down. There might be some 
>>typos. It's just too fast to catch everything. ).
>>It's a Monarch ULB 2000 workstation with two AMD Athlon MP 2000+ 
>>processors, 3 GB RAM, two Seagate SCSI hard drives on an on-board 
>>controller (we boot from sda), a CD-RW and a DVD-ROM as primary and 
>>secondary master, and two Maxtor IDE drives as primary and secondary 
>>slaves (to be RAIDed) on the IDE bus. The machine ran fine under Redhat 
>>7.2 and Redhat 9 before. It has been up2dated and runs now kernel 
>>2.4.21-15.0.3.EL(smp). The problem has been there already right after the 
>>installation with kernel 2.4.21-4.EL(smp).
>
>There is a common problem with the way some SMP Athlon motherboards set
>up the APIC and the SMP kernels.  Uniprocessor kernels don't enable the
>APIC so they won't hit the problem.  The fix is to disable the APICs
>at boot time on the SMP kernels by adding the "noapic" boot option.
>
>If you use lilo to boot, hit "CTRL-X" and type in "linux noapic" at the
>"boot:" command line.
>
>If you use grub, hit "e", scroll down to the "kernel" line, add
>" noapic" (don't forget the leading space) to the end of the line, hit
>"ENTER" and press "b" to boot.
>
>If the "noapic" option works for you, update your boot loader config
>file to use that option.  If you use lilo, don't forget to run lilo
>after tweaking the file.
>
>NOTE: "noapic" will slow the average system down a very tiny amount.  I
>doubt that you'll even be able to notice it without benchmarking.  It
>will have a greater effect if the machine gets hammered with interrupts,
>but that's pretty rare except with a real-time kernel.
>
>>--------------------------------
>>Boot messages:
>>SMP kernel:
>>...
>>Initializing Cryptograhic API
>>NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
>>IP: routing cache hash table of 32768 buckets, 256Kbytes
>>TCP: Hash tables configured (established 524288 bind 65536)
>>Linux IP multicast router 0.06 plus PIM-SM
>>Initializing IPsec netlink socket
>>NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0
>>RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
>>Freeing initrd memory: 311k freed
>>VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
>>Red Hat nash version 3.5.13 starting
>>Loading scsi_mod.o module
>>SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
>>Loading sd_mod.o module
>>Loading aic7xxx.0 module
>>scsi0 : Adapted AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.36
>>         <Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI adapter>
>>         aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs
>>scsi1 : Adapted AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev. 6.2.36
>>         <Adapted aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI adapter>
>>         aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel B, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs
>>blk: queue f7fd6414, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
>>(scsi0:A:0): 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz DT, offset 63, 16bit)
>>(scsi0:A:1): 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz DT, offset 63, 16bit)
>>   Vendor: SEAGATE   Model: ST336752LW        Rev: 0004
>>   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 03
>>blk: queue f7fd7214, I/0 limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
>>   Vendor: SEAGATE   Model: ST336752LW        Rev: 0004
>>   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 03
>>blk: queue f7fd7414, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
>>scsi0:A:0:0: Tagged Queuing enabled.   Depth 32
>>scsi0:A:1:0: Tagged Queuing enabled.   Depth 32
>>**** hangs ca. 30 minutes here, but then comes up *****
>
>Classic APIC hang there.  "noapic" should solve this issue.
>
>>non-SMP kernel:
>>...
>>NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0
>>RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
>>Freeing initrd memory: 304k freed
>>VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
>>Red Hat nash version 3.5.13 starting
>>Loading scsi_mod.o module
>>SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
>>Loading sd_mod.o module
>>Loading aic7xxx.0 module
>>AMD756: dev 9005:00cf, router pirq : 1 get irq : 10
>>PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:0a.0
>>PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 02:04.0
>>AMD756: dev 9005:00cf, router pirq : 2 get irq : 11
>>PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:0a.1
>>PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 WITH 01:05.0
>>scsi0 : Adapted AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.36
>>         <Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI adapter>
>>         aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs
>>scsi1 : Adapted AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev. 6.2.36
>>         <Adapted aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI adapter>
>>         aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel B, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs
>>blk: queue f7fd6414, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
>>***** waits ca. 15 sec here *****
>
>That's the firmware download and/or SCSI controller chip self checks.
>It's normal and there's no way to disable it.  If it waits more than
>30 seconds, you may have other issues.
>
>>(scsi0:A:0): 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz DT, offset 63, 16bit)
>>(scsi0:A:1): 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz DT, offset 63, 16bit)
>>   Vendor: SEAGATE   Model: ST336752LW        Rev: 0004
>>   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 03
>>blk: queue f7fd7214, I/0 limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
>>   Vendor: SEAGATE   Model: ST336752LW        Rev: 0004
>>   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 03
>>blk: queue f7fd7414, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
>>scsi0:A:0:0: Tagged Queuing enabled.   Depth 32
>>scsi0:A:1:0: Tagged Queuing enabled.   Depth 32
>>...
>>***** comes up fine *****
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
>- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
>-                                                                    -
>-      "Doctor!  My brain hurts!"  "It will have to come out!"       -
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Benjamin Hornberger
mailto:bho at gmx.net
http://www.hornberger.info/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~





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