First of all, this is a Sis chipset based board. My best guess is you need
to update the bios to the latest revision first. The other problem is that
the Sis based Intel CPU chipsets are not very well tested in linux. For AMD
processors they are great, and pretty well tested, but not so much in the
Intel arena.

This is probably a Bios/Chipset bug that's causing 'bad' things when
interacting with Sl4's 2.6.9 kernel. 

Update your bios, try setting everything to bios defaults, and try again. If
it's still giving you issues, you may try installing Fedora Core 4 RC2 and
seeing how it fairs (2.6.11 kernel). I'm betting it's most likely a bad
kernel/bios reaction.

Since SL4 is kernel locked, if Asus doesn't fix the problem in bios, you're
going to be out of luck till the next quarterly release.

Michael Joy
HEP - University of Mississippi
[log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael
Mansour
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 4:29 AM
To: Hoffmann, Tony; Scientific-Linux-Users (E-mail)
Subject: RE: Installing SL40 on Hyperthreading CPU

Hi Tony,

This is the board:

http://www.asus.com/products/mb/socket478/p4s533-mx/overview.htm

I'm using a 3.06GHz P4 Intel HT socket 478 CPU.

I ran this board under SL3 (and acpi on) for months using HT without one 
hint of a problem. Booting in UP mode shows no issues, booting in SMP mode 
(without the acpi=off kernel parameter) hangs it everytime.

Michael.

> Hi Michael;
> 
>    Can you give some more details on what mainboard you are using. 
>  This can't be happening on a lot of boards as the FC3 bugzilla 
> report is a couple of months old and has no follow up activity 
> except for your comment on RHEL4 doing the same thing.  Our Dell 
> 2650 (which were somewhat notorious for adaptec raid issues with 
> RHEL3) seems fine with RHEL4.  It has two HT Xeons.
> 
> Tony Hoffmann | Tel/Tél: (250) 493-2277 | Fax: (250) 493-7767
> [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> National Research Council Canada | P.O. Box 248, Penticton BC V2A 6J9
> Conseil national de recherches Canada | B.P. 248, Penticton (C.-B.)
>  V2A 6J9 Government of Canada | Gouvernement du Canada
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask]
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
> Michael Mansour
> Sent: Monday, April 25, 2005 2:34 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Installing SL40 on Hyperthreading CPU
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Most of yesterday I spent time installing SL.40.042005.i386 onto a 
> couple of my rack systems. One of them uses a Hyperthreading CPU 
> which I've used under HT mode without issues under SL3.
> 
> However SL40 (aka the vendors newer kernel) has major issues running 
> in HT mode (UP mode works fine), and just has a hard lock-up during 
> the boot process, where the only thing that can be done is to press 
> the power off button.
> 
> I've tracked this down to a bugzilla filed for FC3:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla-old/show_bug.cgi?id=146921
> 
> where I get _exactly_ the same issue this guy reported. I disable 
> the various services where the hard lock-up occurs, and it gets past 
> them but then on the login prompt, after entering the username and 
> password the prompt just sits there and you can't login.
> 
> After alot of trouble-shooting on this problem, I tracked it down to 
> the ACPI support, once I put in:
> 
> acpi=off
> 
> into the kernel grub command line, the system booted and runs fine 
> in HT mode. From that bugzilla report, it doesn't look like anything 
> has been fixed with that bug yet.
> 
> On a side note, I also experienced that "kernel openafs anaconda" 
> problem when burning those ISO's above and installing them onto my 
> rack servers (the error reported by another guy earlier in this list)
> . The way I got round that problem was to do a vanilla "server" 
> install on selection menu (without specifying the packages I wanted 
> and didn't want), and SL40 installed, I then went back into the 
> packages and selected/deselected what I wanted.
> 
> Do I need to download the new ISO's (042505) and re-install these 
> newly built machines with these ISO's? or is the ISO set I have fine?
> 
> Michael.
------- End of Original Message -------