FC6: Soft lockup on first boot

[dandaman32]

Alright, I'll try to make this quick here, I've literally been up all night downloading and installing FC6:

I just downloaded and installed the latest version of Fedora. But there seems to be a problem with the kernel and I can't boot at all. I turned off the Red Hat Graphical Boot feature and got this text:
EIP: [<c04e06cd>] __list_add+0x49/0x62 SS:ESP 0069:c0b8fd8c
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 927: 1417 Segmentation fault /bin/mount -t binfmt_misc none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc >/dev/null 2>&1

BUG: spinlock lockup on CPU#0, pdflush/151, c0673ff8 (Not tainted)

After that the system just freezes and I'm forced to reboot.

Here's my system configuration:
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ CPU Tyan S2495ANRS mobo, Via KT400 northbridge chipset 1GB Corsair Value Select PC3200 DDR SDRAM Western Digital 160GB hard disk on /dev/hda Western Digital 30GB hard disk on /dev/hdb NVidia GeForce FX 5200 PersonalCinema video card on AGP
Hope this information helps. I can provide more command-line spew if I have to, including call and stack traces.

I think this has something to do with that funky new hybrid kernel. I wish I could just install a "normal" kernel, without Xen or SMP support, since I don't need either on this box.

I saw what appeared to be a similar bug (a soft lockup) on my server, a Pentium III Xeon 866MHz (x2) running FC4 on kernel 2.6.17. I had to revert back to 2.6.11 :(. One of my friends told me to avoid 2.6.17 like the plague...

EDIT: I got the system to boot by preventing the openSUSE partition, which is formatted as ReiserFS, from being automounted at startup. So it looks like this is a bug with the ReiserFS driver.

-dandaman32

[nhydra]

hmmm strange...
Well, can you explain what do you do to got that result? What about the ReiserFS partition?
I suppose you boot and the kernel is dearchived and after that you got the error?

EDIT:
Ohhh yeah i get it .... I got this issue too but then i got dirty filesystem and partitions of one of my hard drives. At that moment my FC5 did not boot at all.I removed the corrupted partitions and FC5 booting was normal.

Can you run fsck to the all partitions on your hard drive? Run FDISK to see for any partition errors too.

[VirtualDarKness]

@dandaman: I had your same problem.. with a 64bit fresh install..

now I saw there was some updates and I've installed them but I have not tried to re-add the reiser partition to fstab yet..

[Darkon]

Yup, same reiserfs problem here too. Seems to be a kernel problem, so we have to wait until they update the kernel.

All my music and stuff is on the reiserfs partition ;_;

[dandaman32]

Problem completely solved by using the standard kernel. I have to use the standard kernel anyway because I use the closed-source NVidia drivers for the 3D desktop.

Here's what I did to fix the problem:
Installed FC6 and watched it lockup on boot Rebooted and launched a shell using the old init=/bin/sh trick on the kernel boot parameters Remounted the root filesystem read-write:mount -n -o remount,rw / Opened /etc/fstab (emacs users: you need to use vi for this, otherwise the screen gets all messed up) Changed "defaults" to "defaults,noauto" in the options part of the entry for the reiserfs partition Saved, closed Remounted the root filesystem read-only, to sync the changes:mount -n -o remount,ro / Rebooted

-dandaman32

[IanRoyle]

I have the same error message but I get it when booting from the Fedora Core 6 install CD. As soon as the boot gets to running /sbin/loader I get

BUG: spinlock lockup on CPU,0, swapper/0, c06e0980 (Not tainted)

plus a stack dump. I've tried all the different install options, and also installing from a file partition but they all do the same. FC5 had no problem and installed and ran flawlessly in the couple of months I've had it. This is on a dual partition Compaq R4000 laptop.

Anyone got any ideas? I'm very much a Linux newbie, and the fact it does it at the very beginning of the install has me completely stumped for ideas.

Many thanks


Ian

[rhka]

Anyone have the line in /etc/fstab for reiserfs and etc3, both read and write for all users.
My machine stops when booting with this line in /etc/fstab:
/dev/hdb3 /mnt/suse reiserfs defaults,noauto 0 2

[joe.pelayo]

dandaman32 does your solution mean that I should make
LABEL=/ / reiserfs defaults,noauto 1 1
and
LABEL=/home /home reiserfs defaults,noauto 1 2
or where you talking about other 'non esencial' partitions?

Besides, sometimes I does not experience that bug so I can log in to the system. Of course I can make this changes from 'inside', can't I?

Comment: In my previous installation of FC6 (which unfortunately I lost) I got this error with ext3 file systems.

Thanks.

[dandaman32]

Joe - you need to boot the system and then open a terminal. Type "su -" to get to a root console, then do "yum install kernel kernel-devel". That will install the "normal" non-Xen kernel. Using the non-Xen kernel obviously keeps Xen from working, but you won't need it unless you're doing virtualization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization).

Edit: make sure you select the right kernel from the menu when you boot your system - there will be one that ends with ".fc6", and one that ends with ".fc6xen". You should choose the one that ends with ".fc6".

-dandaman32

[joe.pelayo]

Hello dandaman32.

I already have the package kernel-devel installed in my system (the one matching my kernel version: 2.6.18-1.2849) and as far as I can see in Yumex it is not the XEN kernel (in fact the XEN kernel appears in the list of programs that I can install).

When I updated the kernel (in fact "Software Updater" did it) I did not remove the old one (that bundled with FC6) but I don't think that is the problem. When the system boots the '2849' is my default one but I have noticed that when that problem appears then no matter what kernel I start the bug is there.

Something I have noticed is that most of the times when I properly shutdown the system it does not get the error.

[dandaman32]

I'm not sure what's going on here - I only had problems until I got rid of XEN. Try booting another distro (this one (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) works good for testing, etc.) and mounting the hard disk in there. Something like "mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1" should do the trick.

-dandaman32

[joe.pelayo]

I will try that distro, I hope it is only a live cd because I don't want to reinstall.

What is exactly the SMP kernel meant for? I read somewhere that it supports multiprocessor systems. Do you think I need to use it since mine is a dual core laptop? (Perhaps that solves the problem :) )

[dandaman32]

Whoa... an X2 laptop? O.O where do I sign up? :P

SMP stands for Symmetric MultiProcessing. I'm not sure if SMP is required for dual-core systems or not. In my experience however the SMP kernel works fine on single-processor machines just fine. I heard from Pharaoh Atem that Linux isn't always that good at supporting the latest and greatest CPUs, so you might have to wait for a while until the X2 is better supported.

Yes, "that distro" is a live CD. I still gotta wonder why he chose that name (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ#Why_the_name.3F) for it :-P

-dandaman32

[FuzzyLumpkins]

I had a similar problem. The first time I booted FC6, the screen went black at the bootup process. I waited but nothing happened, so I pressed the power button once and FC6 "cleanly" shutdown. After a reboot everything worked as it's supposed to work. Although I had to manually download an i686 kernel because the FC6 installer put an friggin i586 on my computer

[joe.pelayo]

Today my FC6 behave just terribly. For instance, it took me up to 5 reboots to get an 'operational system' for when I could boot properly (no BUG error) the machine hang several times forcing me to make improper reboots until I got the known BUG error. I was really mad with the machine. That is why I am gonna try the SMP kernel today (I already have the normal i686 kernel installed) I will also try the latest ATI drivers for my graphics card, and if that does not work I will go back to Mandriva until FC7 gets out, but perhaps instead of Mandriva I will use PC-BSD, I am testing it in another computer with very pleasant results (it is the most 'solid' SO I have ever installed, a true UNIX).

[joe.pelayo]

Do you think all the problems described above can be related to a boot virus?

I ask this because I have found that my USB flash drive has a virus (obviously I realized this in another machine since I mostly use Linux in this, mostly but not always). I have not made any research about the specific virus but I thought that it could have to do something with my problems (so far it has been a long time since the last time I scanned the USB device, so the virus could have been in my system for weeks).