Re: Xen / Dell 2850 PERC 4e/Di lock up

[Shane Chen <inconceivable@gmail.com>]

On 7/19/05, Ian Pratt <m+Ian.Pratt@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Have you tried 2.0-testing with 'noirqballance'?

I have to admit and say that I did post before I had turned up the
noirqbalance thread.  I've since then compiled a new testing kernel
(dea74c466948d94a181bf0009c44ea51  xen-2.0-testing-src.tgz) and tried
the noirqbalance (and did some more troubleshooting - more below).

First, the noirqbalance does help.  The box definitely does not
completely lock up.  But it would still sort of pause briefly.  I
guess you could say that it stutters.  However, I'm not completely
sure I managed to get it working because I never saw "XEN: Platform
quirk -- Disabling IRQ balancing/affinity" when I did `xm dmesg`.  So
then the curious question for me is then why it didn't completely hang
when I tried the same thing (multiple times).

Second, it turns out that I lied about the nousb thing.  The kernel I
had compiled used USB as modules.  So that even if you pass it nousb,
the coldplug script on gentoo manages to load all of the usb modules
regardless.

If I manually unload the usb modules, the lock up completely goes away
(does not stutter).  Since I don't need USB for my Xen project, I've
gone ahead and disabled it the in the BIOS.

I'll be glad to provide addtional information or try additional things
and give feedback.

Thanks,
Shane