Re: [APIC] Kernel panic, rsync corruption, intel q8200, 2.6.28-rc8

From: Sam Ruby
Date: Tue Feb 10 2009 - 06:47:14 EST


yakui_zhao wrote:
On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 07:50 +0800, Sam Ruby wrote:
Len Brown wrote:
Do you have a second computer around with a serial port ? If yes, then
please add the following to the kernel command line:

earlyprintk=serial,ttyS0,115200 apic=debug

and connect the serial ports with a null modem cable. Fire up a
terminal program on the second machine and capture the output.
I do have a second computer, and went out and bought a null modem adapter for
my serial cable and connected the two machines. I've tried installing minicom
and also connecting it to ttyS0 at 115200 baud on the second machine, but when
I boot the first machine I don't see any output on the terminal.
/boot/grub/menu.lst:

serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal --timeout=300 serial console
Do you have an opportunity to try the boot option of "acpi=off" as
suggested by Lenb?

That also produces the "MP-BIOS bug" message and halts.

From the log it seems that there exists the following warning
message:
>ïMP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC

Can you try the following boot options?
a. acpi_use_timer_override

That also produces the "MP-BIOS bug" message and halts.

b. acpi_skip_timer_override

That also produces the "MP-BIOS bug" message and halts.

c. noapic

With that, I can boot, but I get data corruption problems. Data corruption problems I don't see when using the same hardware but with Microsoft Vista. More details can be found here:

http://intertwingly.net/blog/2009/01/20/noAPIC
http://intertwingly.net/stories/2009/01/22/

I am willing to install new kernels on fresh hard drives, run diagnostic programs and report the output, including capturing serial output. Is there any data I can gather to help diagnose this problem?

Thanks.
is what I use.

this will give you a prompt from grub even before the kernel boots
so you can select (and edit) your kernel via menu over the serial line
if you wish.
I've got that working now. I used minicom on the remote machine, capturing the output. You can see me fumbling around, editing the kernel command and booting here:

http://intertwingly.net/stories/2009/02/09/minicom.out

While it is difficult to make out what I did given line wrapping, etc, what I started with was:

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=4fce230e-fe72-4685-aab0-294ef1c20efa ro noapic quiet splash

After editing, what I had was

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=4fce230e-fe72-4685-aab0-294ef1c20efa ro quiet splash earlyprintk=serial,ttyS0,115200 apic=debug

As you can see, the last line I saw was "Starting up ...", after which point the "MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC" etc output appeared on the monitor that is directly connected to the machine being booted (i.e., this text did not appear on the minicom session).

If this doesn't work, then the kernel earlyprintk is unlikely to work also.
At the moment, it looks like it works, but earlyprintk does not work for me, at least not on Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic.

Note that there may be some BIOS SETUP options related to the serial port -- worth checking.

Also, in minicom, be sure to turn off HW flow control

there is a fancy serial console document someplace on this,
probably at http://tldp.org/
As I have managed to get grub to talk to the serial console, I did not explore these options further. Please let me know if there is something in particular I should explore.

good luck,
-Len
- Sam Ruby
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- Sam Ruby
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