Hello-

Recently, I attempted to upgrade all of our Operations consoles to the 
latest kernel, kernel-2.6.9-34.EL. For most of them (Intel 865 chipset) 
this was a routine process, but on our newest few (Intel 945 chipset), it 
caused a kernel panic. The previously installed kernel, 
kernel-2.6.9-22.0.2.EL worked fine on all.

I started by applying the latest Intel Bios update, version 3869 dated 
May 19, 2006, as well as all SL updates to the systems, but this did not
help.

I eventually traced the problem down to our use of NVidia NVS-400 video 
cards, but unfortunately it's not as simple as the vendor supplied driver, 
as the panic happens well before that is loaded, and even if it is not
installed. The problem seems to be related to setting the Bios parameter
"Primary Video Adapter" to "Ext PCI Graphics". When it is set this way, the 
computer will not boot the 2.6.9-34 kernel. It must be set to "Int Graphics 
(IGD)", which is annoying because even though I have 8 LCD's attached to 
these computers, I do not normally have a one attached to the on-board port, 
and therefore cannot see the console output during boot. I did play around 
with the DVMT settings as well, but this did not help.

I enabled hyper-threading, and attempted using kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.EL, but 
the computer then went into a continuous reboot cycle. This did provide a 
little more information, as it did seem to spontaneously reboot when it 
reached the agpgart section, which is why I suspected the graphics problem. 
All of these reboots/panics happen before logging starts, so I have no logged 
output at this time.

I have attached the output of lspci -v for each kernel, perhaps that will
enlighten someone. For now I have my work-around, where I set the primary 
adapter to on-board, and plug a monitor into it if required. This is a bit 
annoying, but I can live with it for the time being.

I would be happy to troubleshoot and provide additional information if
required.

Cheers
Chris
--
Chris Payne			ISAC Operations Controls System Manager
"Relax Snap, this is particle physics, not rocket science."