Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 76829
2.4.18-17.7.x/2.4.18-17.7.xsmp errata does not boot on N440BX + DAC960 combo
Last modified: 2008-08-01 12:22:52 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Description of problem: I have an Intel N440BX-based system with a DAC960 raid controller. This system has run the SMP version of the kernel, since the non-SMP version has never booted correctly. With the latest kernel errata (2.4.18-17.7.x), the kernel freezes at: VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_6.5.0 initialized The system is totally frozen at this point. It does not respond to SYSRQ or any other inputs. A hard power cycle is required to bring it back. The previous kernel, 2.4.9-34smp, boots fine. For reference, the non-SMP kernel boots up until: DAC960: ***** DAC960 RAID Driver Version 2.4.11 of 11 October 2001 ***** DAC960: Copyright 1998-2001 by Leonard N. Zubkoff <lnz@dandelion.com> and then stops. The system does respond to SYSRQ and can be rebooted using SYSRQ b. Since this kernel contains security fixes, I would like to upgrade to it. The system is on a serial console and could be accessed remotely by a RedHat engineer, if desired. The full boot sequence, including BIOS mesages, is accessible via the serial console. The system and the DAC960 have both been upgraded to the latest BIOS releases, with no effect on the problem. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot system with 2.4.18-17.7.xsmp kernel 2.System freezes at filesystem quota message (see description) 3. Additional info:
Two additional data points: kernel-debug-2.4.18-17.7.x _does_ boot on this machine successfully kernel-bigmem-2.4.18-17.7.x does not boot on this machine. It freezes at the same point as the smp kernel. Also, the kernel actually prints the first 'p' of 'pty: 2048 Unix98 ptys configured' before it freezes hard.
This sounds like the same hang as in Bug 81575. The hang there is in the same place, only displaying the first 'p' in the last line below: VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_6.5.0 initialized Detected PS/2 Mouse Port. pty: 2048 Unix98 ptys configured
I'm having the same issue with 3 other servers at 3 different client locations. On boot, the system hangs with: pty: 2048 unix98 ptys configured The system I'm looking at right now is an Intel server n440bx. I have the SMP kernel running even though there's 1 processor (Related to another bug a while back base on intel N440BX system boards). I cannot boot to a non-smp kernel on this system (the RAID card freaks out). The two other systems I'm not sure what system board/processors are in them. I do know that they are Athlon based though. Also, I tried all the 2.4.18-x kernels that have been downloaded on the system and all display this problem. Any of the 2.4.9-x or lower kernels work to a certain extent. However, it looks like a few of the services are requiring the usage of the newer kernels so I have to be careful of which one to select for booting. The last one that works totally on this system is 2.4.9-34smp. 2 of the problem servers I have are web servers on the Internet. I would feel -much- more comfortable if I could get the newer kernels on for security reasons.
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/