Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 69295
(BIOS)System Error 16 crash loading on Athlon SMP
Last modified: 2008-08-01 12:22:52 EDT
Description of Problem: anaconda crashes at the end (or near end) of processing the first CD on a dual Athlon SMP using a Sony 56X CD. The processors are the 2.2GHz Athlon MPs with the 760MP chipset. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Whatever ships with RH7.3 How Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. installing on a clean machine from cdrom - use vanilla workstation config 2. observe unhandled exception from Python at about the point the system asks for the 2nd cdrom. 3. abort the system load Actual Results: crash, backtrace printout. System Error 16, Device of resource busy. No system installed. From the backtrace it looks like they system was trying to unmount the cdrom ... Expected Results: No problems reported, system installed. Additional Information: This is a showstopper in bringing the system up.
Created attachment 66104 [details] a fragment of the python backtrace
The RH support folks have decided that this is a real bug and not a cockpit error and handed me off to you. What sort of response time can be expected. I've provided a summary of the information provided the support folks below. I browsed the bugzilla anaconda file. Several reports of this problem can be found there. See 66224, 64422, 62416. Comments with at least one of the bugs claim this to be a media problem! A check of the /tmp/syslog file for the failed install showed no error reports and nothing unexpected. There was no listing of anything after the journalling file system(s) were enabled. I checked the RH7.3 media with the mediacheck option. They passed. In frustration, I tried a RH 7.2 install. It worked--that is, I did not encounter the anaconda bug. Although I am at a loss to explain the mechanism, perhaps media errors are the problem. (Support: What's the procedure to get fast turnaround replacements? I need to get this particular system up and running and stable.) The RH support proposed a solution, performing the load with: linux noathlon mem=nopentium pci=bioirq hdc=cdrom ide=noautotune produces the same problematic results. The install fails and anaconda dies in /usr/lib/anaconda/isys.py at line 171 in umount in the statment rc = _isys.umount( what ) where the value of what is '/mnt/source', Remove_Dir (another parameter) defaults to 1, and the failure is an unhandled exception, System Error (16, 'Device or resource busy'). The hardware consists of a Tyan 2468 GN Dual Athlon MBD with the 760MP chipset, 2 x Athlon 2100MP processors, 2 GB DDR Memory, IBM 7200 RPM 80GB IDE disk (primary master) and a 56x CDROM (secondary master).The BIOS setting for the disk lage disk access mode is "Other" as opposed to "DOS". Other BIOS settings are as factory designed.,
After several rounds with the RH Support folks, they identified an undocumented flag for the boot linux, apic, which seems to have solved the problem. I was able to install RH Linux 7.3 on the new machine and configure things appropriately. Apparently, the source of the bug was a misdirected interrupt.
Filing with kernel since its a piece of hardware they ought to know have problems.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/