|
I have (re)booting problems
with 6 brand new Dell 2650 systems, so they all have the latest firmware/bios.
I have omitted all the details for the sake of brevity. Each system has: - two Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU
2.80GHz - 6GB Memory - 4 internel drives (2 x 36GB
root h/w mirror, 2 x 72GB drives unused h/w mirror) They are installed from a
using a minimum configuration plus a few extra RPMs, and have an LVM Root
configuration. [root@broken root]#
mount /dev/sda1 on / type
ext3 (rw) none on /proc type proc
(rw) none on /dev/pts type
devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620) usbdevfs on
/proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw) /dev/Volume00/home on
/home type ext3 (rw) none on /dev/shm type
tmpfs (rw) /dev/Volume00/tmp on
/tmp type ext3 (rw) /dev/Volume00/usr on
/usr type ext3 (rw) /dev/Volume00/var on
/var type ext3 (rw) /dev/Volume00/public1
on /opt/public1 type ext3 (rw) /dev/Volume00/public2
on /opt/public2 type ext3 (rw) /dev/Volume00/log on
/log type ext3 (rw) The systems boot/reboot
without issue on a non-SMP kernel, 20+ reboots without any problems. With a SMP kernel it hangs on
reboot after I do a “shutdown –r now”, but not every time and
not predictably. For example, a system may reboot successfully 5 times in a
row, but then refuse to reboot on the sixth attempt. Booting off a non-SMP
kernel (which always works) and then rebooting with a SMP kernel usually gets
the system up and running but not always. The reboot seems to hang at
one of the following points in the boot sequence: - enabling swap - configuring the loopback
interface - configuring IPTABLES. This affects all the Kernel
releases I have tried so far: -
2.4.22-1.2199.nptlsmp, 2.4.22-1.2197.nptlsmp, 2.4.22-1.2115.nptlsmp I have also tried the
"noapic" boot option; this seems to help some, but not all the time. I have seen various *issues*
with respect to the Xenon hyper-threading, is this the cause? Is it LVM with
SMP, or the fact that swap is an LVM volume? This affects all of these
systems in the same way, so I doubt it is h/w related, but this does not
eliminate it being a BIOS/firmware issue. What can I try next? Am I going to
better off if I buy a supported RHEA release or am I going to have the same
problems? -------- Geoff Collis, Kelkoo |
