Hang while booting 4.15.7

From: Brian Rak
Date: Thu Mar 08 2018 - 11:27:48 EST


We have some Dell servers running Intel Gold 6126 processors. Some of them hang on boot under 4.15.7, but work fine on 4.14.14. When they hang, we see the following on console:

Error parsing PCC subspaces from PCCT
watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU #16 stuck for 23s! [swapper/0:1]

We see that PCC subspaces error under 4.14 as well, but it doesn't cause the machine to hang.

So far we haven't been able to correlate these hangs with anything in particular. Some machines will hang, some machines will boot. They're otherwise identical as far as hardware and firmware goes.

I've tried pcie_aspm=off, since that seems to be the next bit of code that's being executed. This resulted in the machine booting a little further, but then oopsing somewhere in acpi_os_purge_cache. I'm not able to get a full trace there, as I don't have serial access easily available.

Any suggestions?