[CentOS] Installation on Knights Landing (KNL) machines failure

Tue Aug 22 16:54:31 UTC 2017
Arif Ali <mail at arif-ali.co.uk>

Hi all,

We have a customer, where we are trying to install CentOS 7.3 on the new 
Intel Knights Landing nodes, unfortunately, we are unable to install 
then using PXE boot.

Now, I have a lot of experience of installation of machines using PXE 
boot, so the setup of that is not the problem. Both myself and my 
colleagues have looked through the problem, and we are unable to get 
much diagnosis of the problem.

When booting the machine via the network, it loads the ramdisk, and then 
we get no output, and then the machine reboots. Unfortunately, we have 
unable to get anything else on the screen. The machines don't have VGA, 
and monitor capable ports, so we are stuck with Serial Over Lan over IPMI.

We have however, after some searching via search engines, we found some 
documentation suggesting that RHEL 7.2 and then with significant updates 
on 7.3 do work on these types of machines. We have then followed the 
same process to try installing the machines, and we have managed to get 
the machine up, and in a working order. However, we'd like to use CentOS 
7.3, and would like to find the process of doing so, if it is any different

I was wondering to see if anyone else has seen any similar issues, and 
if there is a problem here, that we haven't tackled? Any further 
debugging we can do? Any assistance on this would be much appreciated

-- 
regards,

Arif Ali