Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 55358
Installer hangs when loading aic7xxx driver on my L440GX+
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:52 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Description of problem: Installer stops on the stage, loading aic7xxx driver on my L440GX+ chipset-based server. But when I switch console to ALt+F4 I see messages due to timeout on my SCSI adapter... And it loops...
I have run into this same problem on an Intel dual processor (550MHZ PIII) motherboard (440GX+ which includes SCSI) This same problem existed in the 7.1 Redhat and required a special install boot floppy to work around (See the RedHat 7.1 install gotchas page at http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/gotchas/7.1/gotchas-71.html for more details) I am somewhat surprised that the new 7.2 release has problems on this same platform.
Assigning to kernel so the relevant explanation can be posted.
Unfortionatly the 440GX problem is a bios bug, and due to "Intel Proprietary Information" we cannot work around it properly. The on thing you can try, and that works most of the time, is passing "apic" on the syslinux prompt as kernel parameter. The official text Intel and Red Hat agreed on is: --------------------------------------------------------- Most implementations using the 440GX chipset require the "apic" option to function correctly. When this is the case, providing DMI information to Red Hat as documented below[1] may allow us to automate that setting in the future. On some systems, the "apic" boot flag may not work. Unfortunately, because of Intel Proprietary information, these platforms are not supported at this time. [1] wget http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/dmidecode.c gcc dmidecode.c -o dmidecode ./dmidecode | \ mail -s 'requires apic option to install' hardwarebugs-list@redhat.com
Created attachment 35821 [details] The output of the dmidecode program when run on the server that fails to install with RedHat 7.2
Just to confirm: "apic" makes it work ?
Hi there! I have tried "linux apic" at boot promt and it worked for me!
I have just installed Redhat 7.2 on my L440GX+ box - everything went smooth! At boot promt I gave "expert apic" That's all! Thanks...
See also Bug 78234 (against RHL 8.0), which describes a fix for when the APIC/SMP workaround does not work. (In short: Fixed in pristine kernel 2.4.20.)