Re: pv_ops dom0 kernel failure with ata_piix

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>]

Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 08:18:45PM +0200, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
>   
>> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 06:52:11PM +0200, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 11:47:40AM -0500, Todd Deshane wrote:
>>>       
>>>> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@iki.fi> wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>>>> Try changing the SATA mode of the disk in the BIOS to either legacy or
>>>>>>> ATA, depending
>>>>>>> on what you bios supports.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There is still a known issue with some of the AHCI stuff.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>               
>>>>>> I'm not using AHCI at all.. AHCI (SATA) controller does not have any disks
>>>>>> plugged in.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> My (only) disk is attached to IDE/PATA ICH6 controller..
>>>>>>
>>>>>>             
>>>>> I tried disabling AHCI anyway (even when I'm not using the AHCI SATA
>>>>> controller), but it didn't help.
>>>>>
>>>>> Booting the pv_ops dom0 kernel still fails.. because the IDE/PATA controller
>>>>> still gets disabled (just like in the logs above) for some unknown reason.
>>>>>
>>>>> -- Pasi
>>>>>           
>>>> So from the log it looks like you are getting a hard crash?
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> No, it's not a hard crash.. I'm able to reboot the box with ctrl-alt-del. 
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Did you try adding noreboot to the xen command line and then trying
>>>> to get any more information with sysreq stuff?
>>>>
>>>> Another thing that I noticed in the log is:
>>>>
>>>> irq 12: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
>>>>
>>>> Is it an smp kernel? I had some weird problems when passing nosmp at
>>>> one point.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> Yep, it is SMP kernel.. 
>>>  
>>>       
>>>> I don't recognize this crash, those module traces, at least for me were
>>>> non-fatal and didn't cause a crash. I was normally just dropped to a
>>>> initramfs prompt in the case when the disk was not detected properly.
>>>>
>>>> I was then able to at least look around and check that modules were
>>>> loaded correctly etc.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> The problem seems to be the IDE controller/disk is not detected at all..
>>> because the device gets disabled for some reason during ata_piix
>>> loading/probing.. 
>>>
>>> That is the only disk I have, so the root partition is on it.
>>>
>>> Same kernel works just fine on baremetal without Xen.
>>>
>>>       
>> So I guess the subject should be 'failure with ata_piix' instead of 'crash'.. 
>>
>> Anyway, there seems to be problems with ata_piix too.. in addition to AHCI.
>>
>> Jeremy: Can you think of anything to try? 
>>
>>     
>
> I tried booting with "nosmp" dom0 kernel parameter:
>   

Yes, nosmp is known to make things worse.  It has the side-effect of 
disabling io_apic support, so all the interrupt stuff fails in the way 
you've noticed.

    J