[CentOS] Sun Fire X4200 M2 / CentOS 5 APIC issues

Thu Jan 10 22:44:43 UTC 2008
Ryan Ordway <rordway at oregonstate.edu>

On Jan 9, 2008, at 2:04 PM, Ryan Ordway wrote:

>
> On Jan 9, 2008, at 12:27 PM, Jack Bailey wrote:
>
>> Ryan Ordway wrote:
>>> I had been running CentOS 5 happily on my Sun Fire X4200 M2 systems,
>>> then I upgraded the BIOS and iLOM firmware. Now I'm running into  
>>> what
>>> seems to be a fairly common problem with newer motherboards. I  
>>> cannot
>>> boot unless I use the 'noapic' kernel option. If I try to boot the
>>> kernel normally, I get the error:
>>>
>>> "MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC"
>>>
>>> I can boot using noapic, but interrupts are *HORRIBLE* with noapic  
>>> on
>>> the X4200 M2. Here is a system with the new BIOS running with  
>>> noapic:
>>
>> What firmware version is it?  I'm running on the version from the  
>> FW12201_BIOS61600_4100M213.iso disk on Sun's web site and don't see  
>> that error when booting.
>
>
> Ahh, I may have used an old image. It's BIOS 0ABJX043, and it looks  
> like that image you gave contains 0ABJX044. I'll try that version  
> and see if it fixes the issue.


That was definitely the problem. I had upgraded the BIOS directly from  
the iLOM using tftp. But I did:

tftp -source tftp://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd/path/to/ilom-bios.ima

When I forced it to upgrade the BIOS with:

tftp -f -source tftp://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd/path/to/ilom-bios.ima

It actually installed the 44 BIOS. I wasn't running the 43 BIOS before  
though... botched BIOS update maybe?

In any case, it's fixed now and definitely not a CentOS/kernel problem.

Ryan

--
Ryan Ordway                           E-mail: rordway at oregonstate.edu
Unix Systems Administrator               rordway at library.oregonstate.edu
OSU Libraries, Corvallis, OR 97331    Office: Valley Library #4657