Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 12790
kernel panic when booting
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:56 EDT
I built a computer with the following hardware: Athlon 700 MHz Asus K7V mobo w/o audio 128 Mb PC133 from Mushkin (run at 100 MHz) Diamond Viper V550 video card 300 W Sparkle power supply 50X Asus CD drive Western Digital 13.6 GB hard drive SoundBlaster Live! 3COM/USR 2977 56K PCI modem I loaded RH6.2, and the installation went fine. I booted the computer, and about 1 sec after the lilo prompt the computer crashed, giving the following error message: Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task! In swapper task - not syncing The boot screen would then freeze and nothing else would happen. I had a copy of Storm Linux 2000, Rain release. That OS installed and ran on my machine, no problem. Next I called tech support. I received the following suggestions (none of which worked): boot from floppy; install the LILO boot record on the first sector of the boot partition; get a new installer disk from RH/support/errata: boot-20000407.img and update-disk-20000407.img I also pulled the modem and sound card; UNDERclocked the CPU; did a Custom (16M for \boot and 256M for Linux Swap) and Workstation install, and my machine did not boot. The last tech I spoke with ran out of ideas, and suggested I report this error to you. Thank you, James Tonnison
I, too, have the same problem with a similar architecture... Athlon 700 processor; Voodoo3 3000 PCI graphics card; 128MB 200MHz RAM; USR 56k External Faxmodem; Creative Labs CD-RW DVD-rom drive (don't know the manu- it's a new box) 30GB Western Digital Hard drive NO SCSI DEVICES ONE CPU ONE HDD Some background - I got the EXACT same error after several attempts at installing 6.2 professional. Successfully installed 6.1 standard, but upgrading to 6.2 produced the same error. Tried several different configuration options and BIOS configurations, but to no avail. Finally installed 6.1, had fdisk create an empty dos partition table, and installed windows to look at the hardware. The hard drive controller is a 'dual' hard drive controller and also says '(dual fifo)'. I'll get the model when I get home today.
See also bug 14304. Possible cause : The function disable_serial_nr() in /include/asm_i386/processor.h is not present in BOOT (install) kernel, but a kernel (Intel based) with this call (CONFIG_X86_PN_OFF in kernel source) is installed during the install process, both on repair floppy and boot. Workaround : - Boot on CD with "linux rescue" - mount the partition where is the faulty kernel (mkdir /mnt/a; mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/a) - cp /mnt/source/dosutils/autoboot/vmlinuz /mnt/a/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14-5.0 - umount /mnt/a - Ctlr Alt Del. There will be many errors from modules (cdrom, network ...) - Install kernel sources and recompile a good kernel (do not disable processor serial number!). It is better to install kernel sources the first time since cdrom may not be accessible. It is quite porky, but it works. Asus A7V AMD TBird 800
The errata kernel and also 6.9.5 should fix this.
Long fixed, just tidying