Description of problem: Kernel panics randomly on reboot. Suspect problem with SATA and/or ICH drivers. Machines are all Dell Dimension 8{3,4}00s with an ICH chipset. Have seen it on one SATA machine so far, and one PATA machine (could be unrelated). We have RHEL4 installed on many near-identical i686 machines with a combination of SATA/PATA, and are seriously worried that this problem will begin to affect more than just a few machines. Looking at bugzilla, several bugs are filed against Fedora Core3 with a similar kernel (2.6.9-681) - not all of these bugs are marked as resolved, and seem to indicate a more general problem with sata in 2.6 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.9-5* How reproducible: Problem is not 100% reproducible, seems slightly random because machines can be rebooted and work fine for a while, then upon reboot panic again. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install RHEL4 kernel 2.6.9-5.0.3 2. Reboot if != panic, repeat step 2 Actual results: Kernel Panics ---------------------- Call Trace: [<0222dd34>] pci_bios_find_device+0x1d/0x3e ... [<021041d9>] kernel_thread_helper+0x5/0xb Code: 2e 8a 83 96 04 00 00 66 5b 8a d8 66 58 c3 00 01 02 03 04 05 <0>Kernel Panic: Attempted to kill init! Expected results: Normal Boot. Additional info: lspci output ------------------------------------- [pdm@circuit ~]$ /sbin/lspci -v|grep ICH 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI]) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI]) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI]) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI]) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI]) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) IDE Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 8a [Master SecP PriP]) 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 8f [Master SecP SecO PriP PriO]) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) SMBus Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
Incidently, our University has a large number of similar systems which are due to be upgraded to RHEL4. If these random panics become more prevalent, it will seriously impact our RHEL4 rollout.
I have installed RHEL4 U8 to an ICH5/ICH5R system and did not encounter problems running IO stress test, please re-open if you can reproduce this on a 2.6.9-89 kernel.