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