Re: only a single core (out of 8) initialized

[Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com>]

david@lang.hm wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Jun 2009, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
>> Subject: Re: only a single core (out of 8) initialized
>>
>> On Thu, 4 Jun 2009 19:52:36 -0700 (PDT) david@lang.hm wrote:
>>
>>> this is 2.6.30-rc7
>>
>> Were any earlier kernels OK?
>>
>>>  with a patch added to debug a nv sata driver
>>> incompatibility with the Intel SSDs on a tyan motherboard
>>>
>>> on one system it sees all 8 cores, on the other system it only 
>>> initializes
>>> one core.
>>>
>>> can anyone help me spot what's going wrong in the one that's only 
>>> seeing a
>>> single core? If I'm reading things correctly it's seeing both sockets 
>>> for
>>> the NUMA setup, but then only initializing one core on the first socket.
>>
>> good:
>>     SMP: Allowing 8 CPUs, 4 hotplug CPUs
>>
>> bad:
>>     SMP: Allowing 1 CPUs, 0 hotplug CPUs
>>
>> perhaps due to
>>     ACPI: No APIC-table, disabling MPS
>>
>> You could have a poke around in arch/x86/kernel/smpboot.c() and find
>> out what happened here.  I'd be suspecting this code triggered:
>>
>>        /* no processor from mptable or madt */
>>        if (!num_processors)
>>                num_processors = 1;
>>
>> because ACPI doesn't like that board.
>>
>> Did you look into updating the BIOS?
> 
> this is actually the newer of the two systems. I've already escalated up 
> to Tyan about the fact that this board won't see the Intel SSD drives 
> (unless you hotplug the drive). I've forwarded this to them as well. 
> their website does show a newer bios than what was shipped to me.

Yeah, it seems like a BIOS problem on that system. It's missing a bunch 
of the ACPI tables that the other system has.