Re: [Xen-devel] issues getting more than 16M ram to be used without oopsing. 1.2 and 1.3-unstable

["Brian Wolfe" <brianw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Heh, I know what you mean on the VIA boards. I almost always have an issue
booting > 3 month old kernels on them. 8-P I spose I could look at via as
a "enforced upgrade" system. ;)

*nod* I'd tried the noacpi, ignorebiostables, etc. All of the usual tricks
on the xenolinux.gz kernel image as well to no avail pror to harassing
yall. :) I think my friend Adam was feeling a bit abused as a Xen suport
route as well. *grin*

Things are getting a LITTLE bit futher on the bootup. :) Any chance the
IDE , USB, and/or ethernet interfaces are doign something funky?

Here is the lspci -vv and Linux 2.6.4 compiled for K7 and HIGHMEM4G if you
need the raw info. I disabled USB, firewire etc, basicly anything that
wasn't needed for a server setup. Striped scsi out as much as possible as
well (i'm a minimalist on server kernels).

I have attached a copy of the serial console log from booting with
dom0_mem=1800 vs dom0_mem=1600 noacpi ignorebiostables for reference.
I have also attached a log of lspci -vv and the kernel boot log for 2.6.4
+HIGHMEM4G and the screen from memtest86+ 3.0

 If you need ANYTHING to help, please don't hesitate to let me know
directly. The hardware and my time are at you and other xen developers
command. :)


-- 
Brian Wolfe           | Phone 1-(214)-764-1204
President,            | Email  brianw@xxxxxxxxxxxx
TerraBox.com Inc.     |


pub  1024D/73C5A2DF 2003-03-18 Brian Wolfe <brianw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
     Key fingerprint = 050E 5E3C CF65 4C1E A183  F48F E3E3 5B22 73C5 A2DF
sub  1024g/BB87A3DD 2003-03-18


Keir Fraser said:
>> > > Maybe Xen pokes around in different ways/areas than the linux kernel
>> did
>> > > and has found some bad ram and/or APIC  flaw that I just never ran
>> into
>> > > with Linux by sheer chance.
>> >
>> > Okay, I'll take a look at what changes there have been to IO-APIC and
>> > ACPI code up to Linux 2.4.25 -- certainly the most recent 2.4 kernel
>> > matches your IO-APIC version and doesn't print the 'unexpected
>> > IO-APIC' message.
>> >
>> > Perhaps there is some 'quirk' fix that we are missing -- VIA boards
>> > usually need a few of those (the general opinion of VIA boards among
>> > Linux kernel developers is pretty low, I think :-).
>>
>> I've pushed updates from latest Linux 2.4 into Xen. If you don't want
>> to download the source repository and build it yourself, suitable Xen
>> and Xenolinux images are available here:
>>  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~kaf24/xen.gz
>>  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~kaf24/xenolinux.gz
>
> Another couple of things to try:
>  1. Specify 'noacpi' and/or 'ignorebiostables' on Xen's command line.
>     This will cause parsing of some configuration tables to be skipped
>     -- which may help if the BIOS is buggy.
>  2. Let us know more hardware details (e.g. VIA chipset version). It
>  would be useful to see the output of lspci ('lspci -vv').
>
>  -- Keir
>

Attachment: xen-kenf.log
Description: Binary data

Attachment: lspci-vv.log
Description: Binary data

Attachment: 2.6.4-highmem4g.boot.log
Description: Binary data