From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2 Description of problem: I have three Dell 6650s identically configured with identical hardware specs. On two of them, the microcode_ctl program will lock the machine up, requiring a manual power-cycle. On the third, it works just fine. The older version (pre-update) works just fine. Something in the new update is locking up the machine. Even when I do this by hand, it will lock up the machine. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4-9.1.131_FC2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. update to 2.4-9.1.131_FC2 2. reboot box 3. Actual Results: Box hangs at 'Applying Intel Microcode Update' Expected Results: Box should apply the update and continue. Additional info: The boxes are all quad 1.5GHz Xeon machines, 1MB of cache (although Linux reports 512KB) with hyperthreading enabled.
Disabling hyperthreading prevents the hangup with the new version. Enable hyperthreading and it will always hang.
Grr, I'm off-base. I thought these boxes had the latest BIOS updates, but I was wrong. The latest Dell BIOSes fix the problem.