From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Evan Bigall Subject: SMBIOS problem with PXE booting Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:25:40 +0700 Message-ID: <459DD344.6050901@scalent.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: 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 I am using Xen 3.03 on IBM T60s running FC5 and RHEL4 with VT enabled. We have a standard linux bootable iso that we use to run diagnostics (2.6.11 kernel). When I boot that image in an HVM guest, the diagnostics run fine, and SMBIOS looks normal. When I change nothing in the config but the image to boot, and then boot eb-5.4.2-rtl8139.iso (downloaded from *rom*-*o*-*matic*.net), the iso boots, correctly, PXEs, tftps our kernel and ramdisk, but then if I run dmidecode on the ramdisk, it looks like SMBIOS has been corrupted somehow. A correct dmidecode starts out like this: SMBIOS 2.4 present. 10 structures occupying 283 bytes Table at 0x0009f01 Handle 0x0000 DMI type 0, 24 bytes BIOS information Vendor: Xen Version 3.0.3-0 [etc...] The corrupted one looks like this: SMBIOS 2.4 present. 10 structures occupying 283 bytes Table at 0x0009f01f Handle 0x009e DMI type 0, 0 bytes. BIOS Information Handle 0x09e0 DMI type 158, 0 bytes. I've tried integrating the rom image directly into /usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader, but get the same results. Any ideas? I've also noted that in the HVM guest, if I try to boot an SMP kernel, it hangs, only the non-SMP kernel successfully boots. Evan