Description of Problem: Installing Hampton Beta via network install hangs on message "loading aic7xxx" for an extended period of time. Finally, the installation says that it can't find a disk to install on. Had installed RedHat 7.2 two weeks earlier without incident. This also occurs after booting the CDROM directly. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Hampton Beta How Reproducible: Every time. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot CDROM 1 2. 3. Actual Results: Long delay after loading scsi driver and ultimately a claim that no installable disk exists. Expected Results: Should have found SCSI disk 0, and proceeded with partitioning. Additional Information: System is a Intel ISP2150G - 2X Pentium!!! 850MHz
The intel ISP2150's have the 440GX chipset if I remember it right. There is a known bios bug in this 440GX/ISP21xx series machine which gets the IRQ routing ($PIR table) wrong. Instead of fixing this trivial bug, Intel has decided to declare this machine unsupported by Linux. In the past we had a (manually activatable) workaround for this bug; I will port this to the hampton kernel in the next few weeks; I'm surprised someone from Intel cares....it has been 10 months or so since we reported this bios bug.
Just for grins, I built the "off the shelf" linux-2.4.18 kernel and booted it without difficulty. - Richard
Sure if you build a kernel with UP APIC enabled it'll work; same for a SMP kernel
We've put the workaround in, but this is a bug in the Intel-provided BIOS which we won't fix because we can't fix...
I'm probably just obtuse, but just what _IS_ the work-around? Thanks.
The workaround is to ignore the buggy $PIR table for this exact bios by adding the DMI identifiers to the hall-of-shame.