btx/pxeboot problem

[Luigi Rizzo]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 01:48:17PM +0200, Danny Braniss wrote:
> latest pxeboot (7.1):
> 	mother-board	NIC/LOM	CPU
> 	-------------   ------- ---
> 	Intel SWV25	 em	xeon	works fine
> 	SUN X2200	 bge	amd	works fine
> 	DELL PE 2950 	 bce	xeon	failes 95% of the times
> 					hangs or goes into btx dump regs. mode :-)
> 	Intel SE7320VP21 msk	xeon	failes 50% of the times - hangs
> 
> pxeboot with btx.S 1.45 2008/02/27 23:35:39, works fine.

> so it seems that changes since 1.45 have fixed it for some, but it
> brakes for others :-). I can help testing, but btx is way out of
> my league.

interesting, so this is the same problem i was seeing on the Asus/amd
machines here...

the commit log for 1.47 mention interrupt issues which are consistent
with the random hangs or errors that I see while booting over the
network.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/boot/i386/btx/btx/btx.S.diff?r1=1.46;r2=1.47

I wonder if the hangs are related to interrupts coming in at the
wrong time. I also wonder whether the same symptoms might also
affect the standard loader and not just pxeloader, in which case
the problem would be slightly more serious.

I am afraid my ability to debug the problem isn't going much
beyond this...

cheers
luigi