From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Ky Srinivasan" Subject: hardware support Date: Mon, 08 May 2006 09:23:36 -0600 Message-ID: <445F2A37.E57C.0030.0@novell.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org We have had some problems bringing up SLES10/Xen on DL360 box (dual processor). The Compaq boxes have this notion of "auto" mode for MPS/APIC to deal with buggy OSes and under this setting (which is the default setting), vanilla Linux (2.6.16) comes up on this box in UP mode since it finds the local APIC disabled in bios. However, the xen based kernel tries to come up MP and fails in a non-intuitive way by hitting a BUG in the hypervisor code. Following is the stack trace of the xen based kernel: [] alloc_vcpu+0x36/0x120 [] smp_prepare_cpus+0x460/0xd30 [] intel_p6_mcheck_init+0xbd/0xe0 [] get_mtrr_state+0xf4/0x110 [] __start_xen+0x5d1/0x9e0 [] new_tlbflush_clock_period+0x0/0x90 [] start_paging+0x52/0x54 CPU0 FATAL TRAP 6 (invalid opcode), ERROR_CODE 0000, IN INTERRUPT CONTEXT. System shutting down--need manual reset. As opposed to the vanilla linux kernel (that fails to see the local apic), xen sees the local apic (incorrectly) and fails to bring up the secondary CPUs and finally takes the FATAL TRAP as described in the trace above. If however, the bios setting is changed to Full APIC mode, both the vanilla linux kernel and the xen based kernel boot correctly. I wanted to know if others have seen similar problems. Also, is somebody looking at addressing these kinds of issues? Regards, K. Y