Re: IBM x360 2.2.x boot failure, 2.4.9 works fine

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 06:09:50PM -0500, Gordon J Lee wrote:
> IBM has a brand new xSeries PC server called the x360.
> It has 1-4 Xeon MP's, DDR SDRAM, PCI-X backplane, IBM Summit chipset.
> Full specs are here:
> 
> http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/eserver/xseries/x360.html

Eeek, these machines are now in the wild?  Didn't realize this :)

> Has anyone tried running Linux on one of these ?

Yes.

> I have tried a few versions and found:
> 
> 2.2.18    fails in boot
> 2.2.20    fails in boot
> 2.2.21rc2 fails in boot

Ouch :(

> 2.4.9     works fine!

Glad to see this.

> I know the hardware is in good shape because a 2.4.9 kernel works
> fine on this machine.  I have scoured the IBM site, linux-kernel,
> and Google for clues, but to no avail.
> 
> The boot sequence failure under the 2.2.x versions that I tried is
> always the same, it fails to recognize the IDE and SCSI devices.  From
> the messages, the system appears to be deaf to interrupts and so it
> cannot recognize its devices.  Notable messages from the boot sequence
> that support this idea are:

I don't know if anyone ever tried a 2.2.x kernel on these boxes :)
Is there a reason you _really_ need a 2.2.x kernel for this machine?

You also might try a UP 2.2.x kernel on this box to see if the problem
is in the parsing of the APIC tables (as I think it is.)

thanks,

greg k-h