panic on boot

[Kostik Belousov]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 08:24:07PM +0200, Petr Holub wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was about to install September -CURRENT snapshot on a machine
> with 10GE card. When attempting to install from USB CDROM (it's
> a 1U machine without, I get something like a kernel panic
> with a stacktrace running indefinitely and very fast. I must be
> in a very early stage as I was unable to break it anyhow. When
> I tried to break in using serial console (setup using BIOS), the
> last message I get in the console is
> CD Loader 1.2
> and then nothing, but the screen keeps running with sth like register
> dump.
> 
> This behavior also occurs with both i386 and amd64 Sept07 snapshot,
> i386 March07 snapshot and i386 FreeSBIE 1.1 which I attempted to run
> as well. However, Feisty Fawn runs and installs just fine.
> 
> Basically, it's a dual processor dual core (4 cores in total)
> Intel Xeon 5160 @ 3GHz with 4GB RAM.
> 
> Is there any way to stop this and debug it?

There is a known problem with some BIOSes trying to enter protected mode
when serving requests, esp. USB stacks. The usual simptom of the problem
is BTX panic on the console. I cannot say for sure whether this is your
case.

The patch exists that modifies BTX to reflect interrupts and requests into
the real mode, see
http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/realbtx/
http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/realbtx/realbtx.2.patch

You would need to either somehow inplant supplied loader into your CD
image, or rebuild the whole installation CD with patch applied. Again,
I cannot guarantee that the patch is relevant for your problem.
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