4.11 SMP issues on Intel SE7501CW2

[John Baldwin]

On Monday 05 December 2005 11:29 am, Jacques Fourie wrote:
> On 12/1/05, Jacques Fourie <jacques.fourie at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi John,
> >
> > I booted a 6.0-RELEASE CD and the same thing (panic that freezes the
> > machine) happens. Can you think of any way in which to reliably reboot
> > the machine if this situation occurs?
> >
> > regards,
> > jacques
> >
> > On 12/1/05, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > > On Thursday 01 December 2005 08:20 am, Jacques Fourie wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > With reference to the following thread :
> > > > http://groups.google.com/group/mailing.freebsd.smp/browse_thread/thre
> > > >ad/bd4
> > > > 5afab721e1a85/f66c8476272952af?lnk=st&q=%2Bfreebsd+%2B%22failed!%22+%
> > > >2Bpanic &rnum=80#f66c8476272952af
> > > >
> > > > I am seeing the same issue on an Intel SE7501CW2 dual Xeon machine.
> > > > 6.0 as well as -current exhibits the same behaviour. Various postings
> > > > to the above thread suggests that this may be due to the APIC ID that
> > > > the BIOS claims is assigned to the CPU not being the actual APIC ID
> > > > assigned to the CPU. Does anyone have any new information on this
> > > > issue? If the subsequent panic succeeded in rebooting the machine
> > > > this would not be a big issue for me but unfortunately the machine
> > > > hangs after pressing 'y' to the "panic [y/n]" prompt. Is there a way
> > > > in which to initiate a hard reset in software?
> > >
> > > No, there hasn't been any recent info on this and I haven't had any
> > > recent reports of these problems, at least not on 5.x or 6.x.  Can you
> > > try booting up a 5.4 or 6.0 CD to see if they boot up ok?
> > >
> > > --
> > > John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
> > > "Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org
> > > _______________________________________________
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>
> Hi John,
>
> In the end a workaround that "solved" the issue for me (on 4.11) was
> to call cpu_reset() instead of panic() when failing to start an AP.
> This causes the box to reboot reliably instead of freezing and after
> the reboot all AP's also start without any issues.  On FreeBSD 6.0
> (and -current) the panic() call successfully reboots the box so
> although the original problem of failing to start the AP is present on
> these platforms the problem is not that severe.
>
> In case anyone is interested in how to reproduce the problem (on 4.11,
> 6.0 or -current) - just cycle through a few soft reboot cycles (I
> placed a /sbin/reboot line in /etc/rc.local).

Hmm, weird.  I have no idea why the CPU is failing to startup the first time.  
Maybe it needs a longer timeout.  You can try increasing the last DELAY() in 
start_ap() in sys/i386/i386/mp_machdep.c.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org