Re: Problems booting on a Dual-Xeon with 2.4 and 2.6 kernels

[Christian Limpach <Christian.Limpach@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 10:45:17PM +0200, Sven Kretzschmar wrote:
> 
> I tried to make xen work on a dual-Xeon (1 Gig RAM, 2 3ware ATA-Raid Controlers)
> with both 2.4.26 and 2.6.7 kernels, but had no success :-(
> 
> I cloned the newest repository (CSet 1.1183) in an empty dir and only did:
> 
> 1.) make world
> 2.) make linux26
> 3.) make install
> 
> Then during boot of the 2.6 kernel I got the following message during boot:
> 
> fixmap and kmap areas overlap - this will crash
> pkstart: ff800000h pkend: ffc00000h fixstart fbeec000h
> ...
> kernel BUG at arch/xen/i386/mm/init.c:583!
> invalid operand: 0000 [#1]
> ...
> <0>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idel task!
> In idle task - not syncing

That's very odd, because this code is only enable with CONFIG_HIGHMEM
and that's not enabled in 2.6 (and also broken for at least one reason).
I guess the build picked up an old .config or install/boot/config* file,
which is odd since you write that you cloned to an empty dir.  Could
you please compare your .config file with the default config file we
provide at linux-2.6.7-xen-sparse/arch/xen/configs/xen0_defconfig
(i.e run diff -u linux-2.6.7-xen0/.config linux-2.6.7-xen-sparse/arch/xen/configs/xen0_defconfig)

> When booting with the 2.4 kernel I get the same errors as I got earlier with
> trying to boot a 2.6. xen kernel on the same machine (with older CSets)
> - however I had to add the 3ware drivers to the 2.4 kernel config first, it
> was not included by default - :

Could you boot without Xen (native 2.4 or 2.6 kernel, with smp support)
and then send the output of lspci -v?
 
> It seems that the Dual-Xeon machine with 3ware Raid-Controler is a very challenging
> configuration for XenLinux, which discoveres some potential bugs/problems ;-)
> Anybody else had problems booting the newer CSets on SMP machines ?

Not really, most of our machines are SMP.  None of them have 3ware
Raid-Controllers and I don't really think it matters wether it's an
SMP machine or not.

> P.S.: As I was using the newest CSets (1.1183) SMP was disabled in the kernel configs, while
>         I was booting on the Dual-Xeon machine.

yes, and that's how it's supposed to be:  Domain kernels cannot use
multiple CPUs but Xen has support for SMP, and if you run multiple
domains, you can have each run on a different CPUs.

    christian



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