Topic: Esmith UP

[Bill Purcell]

I have an Compaq Professinal Workstation 5000 with dual processor pentium pro.
I tried loading 5.0 and 5.1.2 and both will not boot to the regular esmith boot. Just to the uni-processor UP mode. Any Ideas. Have also put the second processor in same result.

[Lloyd Keen]

When you say "will not boot" did you try selecting e-smith with the keyboard directional arrows and hitting enter at startup or were you just expecting it to automatically boot in SMP mode? If selecting e-smith manually works you will have to edit the /etc/lilo.conf file and change the default boot from esmithup to esmith then run /sbin/lilo to save your changes reboot and you should be running the smp kernel.

[Bill Purcell]

When it boots up. If left alone it just keeps recycling. If I select UP it boots up and works ok?
Thanks for the reply.

[Gary Parker]

E-smith automatically detects how many processors are in a system when you install it. If you install with one CPU and then add another it won't use it, you actually have to reinstall the whole system to get the SMP kernel and modules (no, doing an upgrade doesn't work either, I'm a lazy sod, too, and tried that with disastrous results

If you've installed with 2 processors onboard the lilo.conf should default to the smp kernel (esmith) and you'll have to manually select esmithup at boot time if you want to load the uniprocessor kernel and modules.

It's well worth checking out the Linux SMP HOWTO (http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/SMP-HOWTO.html#toc1) to see if there are any pointers on there. I know that linux smp can be kinda twitchy about having power management turned on in the bios, also check out what version of MP compliancy it's running at (1.1 or 1.4 usually) as this can have an effect on old Compaq kit.

FWIW I've got a e-smith 5.1.2 running quite happily with 2 x PPro 200 on an ECS P6FX2-A motherboard with no mods made at all.

Gary

[Bill Purcell]

Gary;
Spent the last three hours searching. This what I found. It needs to be in MP1.1/1.4 compliant mode. This can be done with a servers bios by chosing to change APIC mode. This is not available for a Workstation 5000. They said also to choose unix operating system. Also not available. OH WELL. When I boot to SMP It seems ok(it does boot sometimes). Except the network cards don't work at all.
Bill Purcell

[Gary Parker]

Hi Bill,
   regards the network cards, did they get picked up automatically by the e-smith install or did you have to set them up manually? If you set them up manually you'll have to make sure that you're using drivers that have been compiled for the SMP kernel. Anything auto-detected by the installer should have the relevant SMP drivers with it I would have thought...

Gary

[Bill Purcell]

Gary;
Everything works just fine if I select UP. If I just let it boot to the normal e-smth mode. It will either reboot right after it goes to loading e-emith or it will boot up but the network cards don't work. ie When I ping it just errors. I just don't think the machine-bios is compatable.
Thanks for the help

Bill Purcell

[Angus]

Hi all..

I got the similar issue.

Got a Dual PPro machine(same mobo as Gary, ECS-P6FX2-A), Diamond Fireport Scsi card and ATI video card.

Boots up fine on UP, but hangs at, what I first thought was the Initialisation of the SCSI driver, however, on UP it can been seen that it tries to setup the APM bits, and then something times-out and the machine is dead in the water.

When Using the SMP kernel, the apm does not find the BIOS for it (tried both on and off in the BIOS), however, on UP it does, and then boots.

As to Bill's Issues with the network card, well i found that in Red Hat (which is what a lot of esmith is based on) won't detect ANY pci device with SMP kernel and the BIOS has "PNP OS = YES" set.

When I change to "PNP OS=NO" works first and every time.

Hope this gives some inspiration to ppl at this late date.

When I have worked out WTF is going on with my system then I will re-post here with what I did.

AM

[Angus]

Heh....

Typical of this mobo, the ECS-P6FX2-A.
Damn PCI Slot matters!!!

Had an internal PCI ISDN adapter in this mobo with NT server at one point.
Damn thing would BSOD regularly to do with an IRQ conflict, on 36< IRQ >44, the driver could not cope with a non standar (up to 15) IRQ.

Never had the problem under Win9x on the board, but at that only uses a single CPU.......

Looks like this was a similar problem...

The lists here may not have had the solution, but I sure learnt a lot

AM