>
> We use a number of SL 6.1 VM hosts and I had upgraded two of our
> non-Production machines to 2.6.32-220.4.1.el6.x86_64 and I noticed
> certain applications behaved oddly.  On a windows XP VM, opening
> Outlook worked fine but selecting the Calendar would cause it to
> freeze.. every time.  Excel would freeze.  No error messages but would
> have to kill them with Task Manager.  Reverting back to
> 2.6.32-220.2.1.el6.x86_64 made no difference but using
> 2.6.32-131.21.1.el6.x86_64 caused the problems to go away.  This was
> observed on two different Linux hosts with two different instances of
> windows XP.
>
> Have not noticed the Linux boxes themselves crashing with
> 2.6.32-220.4.1.el6.x86_64 but I have not upgraded any of our more
> heavily loaded Production machines to 2.6.32-220.4.1.el6.x86_64
> either.


Followup on this old thread:

As I stated above, we were seeing strange behavior with the *-220.*
kernels.  I isolated this behavior to a BIOS setting on our Dell
2950's (I don't know if any newer Dells like a 410 or 610 would be
affected as I have not attempted to update any of our newer boxes).

If the BIOS setting "Execute Disable" is "Enabled" the strange lockups
in the Windows VM as noted above would happen with the *-220.* kernels
but not with *-131.*.  If the BIOS setting is changed to "Disabled"
the Windows VM's work fine with either kernel.


Randy