Urgent problem - 7.x doesn't work on HP servers

[Ulf Zimmermann]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 04:34:31PM +0000, Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Ivan Voras wrote:
> 
> >I've again encountered the problem of FreeBSD 7 not wanting to boot on a 
> >HP server. The last time was early in 7.x development on a HP blade 
> >(2xdual-core Opteron), without any solution (reported on this list about a 
> >year ago). This time it's on a ML 350 G5 machine, with a quad-core Xeon.
> >
> >The problem is very hard to diagnose - the entire machine locks up during 
> >pci bus/device detection - the kernel debugger doesn't work, the keyboard 
> >lights (PS/2 keyboard) don't work, it's completely frozen.
> >
> >This is on both i386 and AMD64 kernels.
> >
> >The machine freezes after detecting pcib6. The working 6.x kernel detects 
> >upto pcib16, and the first device detected after pcib6 is the CISS 
> >controller, so maybe it's the controller driver, but the first machine 
> >(the blade) didn't have CISS controllers.
> 
> FYI, I'm not seeing anything like this on the two DL 145 boxes I'm using 
> for 10gbps testing with 7.x / 8.x.  I did have problems with at least a 
> couple of the BIOS revs in the past, so I'd repeat the advice offered 
> elsewhere in the thread and make sure that it's up-to-date.  There was one 
> BIOS rev where I couldn't use a boot loader cross-built from i386 to amd64, 
> but both the i386 boot loader and the natively built amd64 boot loader 
> worked fine.  The BIOS upgrade made the problem entirely go away, go 
> figure...
> 
> Otherwise, you're probably down to the printf model for debugging, unless 
> you have an NMI button that can get into DDB?  Mine have NMI buttons on the 
> botherboard, I believe, but it requires opening the case to get to.

You can generate NMI from the iLO and iLO2 interface.

-- 
Regards, Ulf.

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Ulf Zimmermann, 1525 Pacific Ave., Alameda, CA-94501, #: 510-865-0204
You can find my resume at: http://www.Alameda.net/~ulf/resume.html