Just wondering if anybody managed to get SMP kernel to boot properly on an old Asus CUV4X-DLS motherboard (older dual P-III)?

I had this problem only with this specific motherboard and 2.6 kernels. First time couple of years ago. And again today (I've just installed CentOS4 on a box that used to run RH7.3). Previously those machines were running Red Hat 7.3 (2.4 kernels), and with 2.4 SMP kernel all worked fine.

The issue I'm having is that when device driver modules are loaded from initrd's init script, insmod doesn't wait until each driver it loads is completely loaded and initialized. It just exits with right away and init script goes on and starts loading next device driver. It looks like bang, system loads all of them in parallel. Of course, this doesn't work really well. Before RAID and SCSI drivers have time to scan the bus and detect disk drives, vgscan is already done, and of course it doesn't find any volume groups, since previous device drivers haven't yet detected any drives. All I can see on console is interleaved messages from various device drivers intializing with messages from LVM, followed by kernel panic because it couldn't mount root file system. All completely out of order. The output on console looks something like this:

Loading scsi_mod.ko module Loading sd_mod.ko module Loading 3w-xxxx.ko module Loading scsi_transport_spi.ko module Loading sym53c8xx.ko module Loading dm-mod.ko module Loading jbd.ko module Loading ext3.ko module Loading dm-mirror.ko module Loading dm-zero.ko module Loading dm-snapshot.ko module Here goes output from loaded modules, in no particular order, all totally mixed up, couple of lines from 3w-xxxx, then couple of lines from sym53c8xx, then couple of lines from 3w-xxxx again and so on...

By the time vgscan is run, even the jbd and ext3 modules are not yet completely loaded in kernel.

If I boot single processor kernel, all is fine. Device drivers are loaded one by one, insmod waits for device driver to initialize properly. Just as it should be. The output on console looks like:

Loading scsi_mod.ko module Loading sd_mod.ko module Loading 3w-xxxx.ko module Otuput of 3w-xxxx detecting RAID volumes Loading scsi_transport_spi.ko module Loading sym53c8xx.ko module Output of sym53c8xx detecting SCSI devices Loading dm-mod.ko module Loading jbd.ko module Loading ext3.ko module Loading dm-mirror.ko module Loading dm-zero.ko module Loading dm-snapshot.ko module

The workaround I have to get system to boot using SMP kernel is to modify init script from initrd, and insert bunch of sleeps after each insmod to give device driver ehough time to initialize before next device driver (wich might depend on one or more previous device drivers) is loaded. This kind of works, but it's just an ugly hack to hide underlying problem. Of course, there is also this nasty feeling that something inside kernel doesn't really work well and that other things might break or that data might get corrupted.

When I was Googling around, I also found suggestion to turn off MPS 1.4 in BIOS, but it made no difference in my case. Of course, turning ACPI off can't be done on SMP kernel (and system works fine with ACPI using single-processor kernel).

I'm still not sure if this is problem with kernel (things worked fine with 2.4 SMP kernels), or some strange bug in (new) insmod executable that surfaces only when using this particular motherboard.

Anyhow, to conclude this lenghty email... Any success/failure story with running 2.6 SMP kernel based distro (particuallary CentOS4) on this motherboard is more than welcome.