Bug 675047

Description of problem:

My customer is using kexec to avoid the excessive amount of time it takes for the UEFI (IBM HS22V blade in this case) to get to the state that it will do a DHCP request (about 7 *minutes*). Essentially using kexec as outlined here: https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-9797 (rebooting without rebooting)

Upon executing the following:

kexec -l /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64 --initrd=/boot/initramfs-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64.img

kexec -e

In the customer's case this operation works only sometimes, and when it does panic, they actually get a variety of different stack traces. Additionally there are other times when the system just hangs completely. I actually have managed to reproduce this issue on similar hardware (IBM HS21) in-house, and in every case the system appears to hang completely (no kernel panic, nada). Just for kicks I tried out the RHEL6.1 candidate kernel and still no change in behaviour.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

kernel-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64


How reproducible:

*On customer's hardware, majority of the time.
*On in-house hardware, every time.


Steps to Reproduce:

1. kexec -l /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64 --initrd=/boot/initramfs-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64.img
2. kexec -e


Actual results:

System panics, or is hung completely.


Expected results:

Successfully load up the new kernel without issue.