Running with APIC enabled crashes a Supermicro server running 7.0/7.1

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday 10 February 2009 9:54:04 am Matt Hempel wrote:
> 
> Dual Xeon 1.8 GHz with hyperthreading.  2 Gigs of Memory.  Server ran 
> 4.11 successfully in production for 5+ years.
> 
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/6013/SYS-6013P-8+.cfm
> 
> Boot fails more than 50% of the time running 7.0/7.1.  Either it panics 
> after failing during the APIC check (at the beginning of boot) or at 
> "Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/mirror/gm0s1a". 
> 
> Panic'ced boots report failures on two different AP#s (2 and 3) and two 
> different PHY#s (6 and 7).   See below.

Look for a BIOS update.  The last time I saw this, some weird interaction with 
SMM was interfering with the delivery of the INIT and/or STARTUP IPIs.  A 
BIOS update that included newer microcode for the CPUs in question fixed the 
issue.  For the boxes I was testing, if I disabled USB legacy compat (which
would result in fewer SMM traps during boot), then the machines would fail to
boot every time.  With USB legacy compat enabled, they would fail 
occasionally.

-- 
John Baldwin