SMP forcing crash/reboot in 4.9-STABLE

[guy at device.dyndns.org]

On 18-Dec-2003 Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
>> This may be related to my problem, though the symptom is different.
>> 
>> Since the same time (around the end of november) i tried many times to
>> build a SMP-enabled 4.9-STABLE kernel for my bi-athlon machine. It
> always
>> hangs (no error msg, total iresponsiveness) at the end of the kernel
> boot
>> (just before mounting filesystems).
>> 
>> I then reverted my cvs tree to use -RELEASE, and all is fine.
>> 
>> I did not yet try a non-SMP kernel. I'll do that asap.
> 
> Just a note - I believe SMP+APIC causes IRQ routing to be handled
> differently compared with a non SMP kernel. We had a problem on one of
> our boxes where after enabling SMP, the box would hang when trying to
> mount the file systems.
> 
> The cause was traced to the raid card we had installed, which was in a
> riser card off of the motherboard (Rackmount server). Plugging the raid
> card directly into the motherboard resolved the problem, as did moving
> the card to the bottom slot of the riser card.
> 
> I have no idea if this is related to your problem, but it did take us
> hours of troubleshooting to work out this was what was wrong.

This may prove a valuable information, as i have many PCI cards in that
machine, amongst which lay a RAID card too. I may not have many choice to
move it around as it is a PCI-64 (from memory, think only 2 of my PCI
slots are 64 wide).

Anyway, will try that (and the serial console heavy debuging session if the
former is not enuf to fix the problem) as soon as i can spend a few hours
on that machine.

Thanks everybody for the help.

--
        Guy