Re: [gentoo-dev] Major MCE problem with SMP on Gentoo kernels

[Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org>]

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On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 07:06, Kevin wrote:
> I've now tried a stage 3 installation booting the 2.6.1 SMP kernel from a 
> 2004.0 LiveCD (the SMP configs on 2004.1 LiveCDs are all broken---see bug 
> #49382).

I know this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but I have a CD
(actually, a GameCD beta) available at
http://dev.gentoo.org/~wolf31o2/x86-ut2004demo-20040420.iso that you
could grab.  It has only one kernel, and it is SMP.  It has booted and
worked successfully on every machine I have tried it on, and even has
X+fluxbox on it.

> I had no lockup problems while running that kernel, but after rebooting 
> with my kernel (gentoo-sources, built with Chris's 
> CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer") I've already 
> suffered two lockups.  I set MAKEOPS="-j1" for safety.

Copy the kernel from my CD and the /lib/modules/2.6.5-gentoo-r1 and see
if that kernel works fine on your machine in your build environment.

> Something very weird here.  Next, I'm going to try booting from the cd and 
> chrooting into my system and then doing more extensive testing of the 
> kernel on the cd, but I'm really running out of options here.  I'll 
> probably also try building another kernel with CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 
> -O2 -pipe".  Any other suggestions?

Try my CD... it works in SMP.  That will help test some of the problems,
especially since the kernel you are "testing" with is not SMP, so you're
not really testing anything.

> Does anyone think that my two CPUs having different stepping levels could 
> have anything to do with this problem?  One is level 7 and the other 9.

It is possible that is causing the problem.  You never really know.  I
*doubt* it should be a problem, unless one CPU is running out of spec.

> Greg KH thinks it's bad memory, but I'm skeptical of that because the main 
> address that fails (some 30 times in a row) is at 1023.8MB and the Dell 
> Utilities only test up to 1022MB, and because I haven't seen the problem 
> with the liveCD kernel.

It still could be bad memory.  I think I would trust memtest86 before
the Dell utilities.  You could also try finding another bootable system
checker.  I'm sure there are plenty available.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Games Team

Is your power animal a penguin?

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