Re: Problem with Gdt driver under smp?

[Pedro Pla <pedropla@holidaymarketing.com>]

Bill Davidsen wrote:

>On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Pedro Pla wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Just to eliminate the possibility of a faulty cpu in up mode I swapped 
>>cpus and it continues to run flawlessly in up, not sure how to eliminate 
>>the possibility of it being the cache controller or the ram since all 
>>simms tested so far failed in mp and ran flawlessly in up, could it be a 
>>bios issue? I think I'm just trying anything and everything to locate 
>>the exact problem now. Any test ideas that could help me pinpoint it?
>>    
>>
>
>Well, Alan has convinced me that trying a boot with "noapic" is a good
>thing, and if the system suddenly starts being okay you know there's a
>problem in either the hardware, design, or kernel. And since the
>performance hit is down in the noise, you can smile and keep on running
>that way.
>
Doesn't seem to help, the only boot option that does is when I force the 
cpu number to maxcpus=0, in smp mode I don't have to specify nosmp and 
it runs with no problems at all, that is, with noapic also specified, 
hmm trying it without noapic specified & indicating maxcpus=0 seems to 
make the machine hang when it reaches the loading of the gdt driver, I 
tried several reboots and it seems to continue doing so after each one, 
it crashes in the middle of the gdt load before the line it usually 
prints which reads:

spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7

am I running into an irq conflict which affects memory??? are the 
problems related to the failing in smp mode?

Also I should mention that it finds a resource collision on one pci 
device, not sure why considering I only have one pci card in the machine 
& it picks it up correctly so I imagine that is something on the 
motherboard, I tried rearranging pci devices in the kernel, and enabling 
and disabling the pnp as usual but to no avail. Anyway it doesn't cause 
me any problems cause whatever device it is I don't use anyway, but I 
thought I'd mention it.

>
>People have mentioned MPS1.1 several times, I can only say try both, I
>have some Netfinity systems which will not boot with 1.1 but run fine with
>1.4. Think power management, if you have it enabled get rid of it and see
>if that changes the problem.
>
If I could only find a way to change it on the scb2 motherboard.. sigh.. 
anyone no how? I've tried the bios, the utilities from intel.. flashin 
the bios with the latest..

>
>As noted, lots of people run SMP without problems. However, I have noted
>that an ill-behaved threaded application can cause problems including
>hangs and crashes.
>
yeah definately, as I mentioned I've run smp with no probs for years, 
until I got onto these machines, I still have an inkling it's the raid 
controller, but it might be the dma or something...

Thanks for all your advice