Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:41:04 +0100 From: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@iet.unipi.it> To: Andrew Thompson <thompsa@freebsd.org> Cc: kib@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Recent versions of pxeboot hang/panic on AMD platform. Message-ID: <20081121234104.GA95875@onelab2.iet.unipi.it> In-Reply-To: <20081121232325.GA15258@citylink.fud.org.nz> References: <20081121231400.GA94863@onelab2.iet.unipi.it> <20081121232325.GA15258@citylink.fud.org.nz>
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On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 03:23:25PM -0800, Andrew Thompson wrote: > On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 12:14:00AM +0100, Luigi Rizzo wrote: > > [copying some people involved with recent related commits] > > > > As reported in kern/118222 recent versions of pxeboot hang/panic > > on AMD platform. > > > > Initial reports mentioned that the RELENG_6 versions worked well, > > however i found out that even the recent RELENG_6 code is problematic. > > > > Specifically, the problem i see on two machines with AMD CPU (one > > is an Asus M2N-VM) motherboard netbooting with PXEboot, is that the > > loading of config files or binary modules (kernel, etc.) randomly > > hangs with recent version of pxeboot (RELENG_6, RELENG_7 and HEAD > > all give the same behaviour). > > I have found that the kernel size can trigger this for me, after > reducing the size I didnt experience loader hangs with pxe. You may want > to experiment with this in your investigations. no luck - the hang often occurs as early as while reading loader.conf, which is way smaller than the kernel. Assuming that the interrupt thing is a possible cause for the bug, I can understand that the kernel size can affect the probability of getting an interrupt at the wrong time. There was one bug due to memory overflow that i fixed in a recent commit to head (see boot/common/interp.c), but this only helped on a different amd64 motherboard. cheers luigi
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