I've been having this for the entire cycle of F9, and it's present in rawhide as well. On a VMWare VM, there's always an early warning, which I assume is a buggy emulated BIOS, but I'm not sure: WARNING: strange, CPU MTRRs all blank? ------------[ cut here ]------------ WARNING: at arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mtrr/main.c:696 mtrr_trim_uncached_memory+0x190/0x195() (Not tainted) Modules linked in: Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.25.2-5.fc10.i686 #1 [<c04279c5>] warn_on_slowpath+0x47/0x73 [<c04f4d58>] ? vsnprintf+0x3e7/0x420 [<c062bc01>] ? _spin_unlock_irqrestore+0x10/0x14 [<c0427e89>] ? release_console_sem+0x195/0x19d [<c0428370>] ? vprintk+0x301/0x330 [<c0428370>] ? vprintk+0x301/0x330 [<c074f94e>] ? do_early_param+0x30/0x6f [<c0757e26>] mtrr_trim_uncached_memory+0x190/0x195 [<c0755d5b>] setup_arch+0x27b/0x449 [<c074f63f>] start_kernel+0x66/0x345 ======================= ---[ end trace ca143223eefdc828 ]---
This spectacular display of fail is VMWares bug.. It should either a) not advertise MTRR support or b) set at least one MTRR to cover the main memory as write-back.
Eh, our own VM solution does the same exact thing (no MTRRs) and we work around it by not emitting the error message. The real solution is to just punt the error message completely.