Re: ECC memory and SMP lockups on Gateway 6400 server

Jason Czerak
2002-04-01T22:26:03Z

On Mon, 2002-04-01 at 04:44, Manfred Spraul wrote:
> > Recently got the goahead to upgrade the Gateway Win2K server to a linux
> > box to replace out old webserver. It's a 6400 server. 2 PIII-733's, 704
> > megs ECC registered ram.. NT ran fine on this box. not a hitch.
> >
> Could you check /proc/interrupts? Is one number extremely high?
>
> And try to boot with "mem=690M". My sis boards become extremely slow if
> I don't limit the memory. I guess the e820 map is wrong, and one of the
> pages are actually power managmenet registes/NVS.
>

The OEM 128 and 64 meg sitck of ECC that came with the machine works
fine. I got an aftermarket ECC stick that NT likes but linux doesn't.

Standard boot with no extra kerenl switches
and it's very slow and CPU load is 1.0

Moby:/proc # cat interrupts
CPU0 CPU1
0: 17736 20742 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 62 70 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
8: 0 2 IO-APIC-edge rtc
20: 434 453 IO-APIC-level eth0
24: 15 15 IO-APIC-level sym53c8xx
25: 1073 1108 IO-APIC-level sym53c8xx
NMI: 0 0
LOC: 38293 38388
ERR: 0
MIS: 0

Booted with "kernel-2.4.18 mem=704M" at lilo prompt and it's still slow

Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=Linux-2.4.18 ro root=802
BOOT_FILE=/boot/kernel-2.4.18 mem=704M

is what dmesg cought.

Moby:/proc # cat interrupts
CPU0 CPU1
0: 15540 18511 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 16 24 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
8: 1 1 IO-APIC-edge rtc
20: 151 162 IO-APIC-level eth0
24: 15 15 IO-APIC-level sym53c8xx
25: 3647 3656 IO-APIC-level sym53c8xx
NMI: 0 0
LOC: 33966 33907
ERR: 0
MIS: 0

I finally got the machine stable with SMP enabled in the kernel (had to
be a heat issue and the mobo shutting things down)

I'm about to compile and use http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-ecc/
to see if I can figure out what exactly is happening.