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@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@xxxxxxxx
