Re: Problems with more than 8 AMD Opteron Cores per System

[Daniel J Blueman <daniel.blueman@gmail.com>]

Ensure your BIOS supports the stepping of the Opterons you have. Eg, if
you have the Iwill H8501, BIOS v1.8 [1] covers all the current
steppings. You may even encounter problems if you mix different
steppings.

--- [1]

http://www.iwill.net/product_2s.asp?p_id=90&tp=BIOS

Oliver Weihe wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've two Iwill 8way Opteron equipped with 8 Opteron 875 CPUs each.
> (In the past we build some systems with singlecore CPUs and they went
> very well)
>
> The Problem now is that the machines crash during boot when maxcpus is
> greater than 8.
> 2.6.12-rc4 works well with maxcpus=8, with 9 or more it freezes after
> "Testing NMI Watchdog... OK"
>
> 2.6.12-rc5 and above have more problems even with maxcpus=4 or less very
> early during booting.
>
> 2.6.13-X crashes later during boot (from 2 to 16 cores it's the same
> behavior)
>
> The last I can so on the console (kernel 2.6.13-rc2-git4, maxcpus=2..16)
> is:
>
> NET: Registered protocol family 1
> Using IPI Shortcut mode
> int3: 0000 [1] SMP
> CPU4
> Modules linked in:
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 212k freed
> Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.13-rc2-git4-default
> RIP: 0010:[<ffffffff8050fc00>]
>
> After that the machines are totally freezed.
>
> With maxcpus=1 all (tested) versions >=2.6.12-rc3 are able to boot.
>
> Any hints/ideas/what ever?
>
> Regards,
>    Oliver Weihe
>
> P.S. if you answer CC me ;)
___
Daniel J Blueman