Re: ISSUE: 2.1.65 boot hangs at "Booting processor 1"

Brian Gerst (bgerst@quark.vpplus.com)
Tue, 25 Nov 1997 09:46:26 -0500


John Goerzen wrote:
>
> Brian Gerst <bgerst@quark.vpplus.com> writes:
>
> > > CPU 166 MHz
> > > APIC bus 0.00 MHz
> > > Booting processor 1 eip 2000
> > >
> > > At that point, at "booting processor", it locked hard. Ctrl-Alt-Del
> > > would not rescue it.
> > >
> > Do you only have the one processor? If so, either recompile the kernel
>
> Yes.
>
> > without SMP=1 in the Makefile, or put 'nosmp' on the kernel command line
>
> This fixed the problem (nosmp). Thanks for the tip.
>
> > (via lilo). Tyan boards seem to report a 2nd cpu even if one is not
> > present (my Tomcat IV does).
>
> My board, incidentally, is not a dual-processor board. Makes it all
> the stranger :-)

Most tyan boards come in single and dual variants. The only difference
between the two is the missing socket and one chip (at least for the
Tomcat). The rest of the board is identical including the BIOS. It is
the BIOS that is telling linux that there is a 2nd cpu even if there
physically isn't one there.

> And -- 2.0.x doesn't have the same problem. Weird.
>
> Perhaps SMP could be made an option in the {menu,x}config system?
> That way I would have said no to it and eliminated the problem
> altogether :-)

This has been discussed before. Linus won't put it back into the config
menu until the dependency system is made more intelligent, so that if
one config option changes, 90% of the kernel doesn't get recompiled
anyways.

> BTW, what the heck is an APIC bus? Never heard of one before now :-)

The APIC is the controller used to synchronize multiple cpu's. It is
only present in Intel cpu's, which is why AMD and Cyrix processors
cannot do SMP (they use OpenPIC, which is an open standard).

-- 

Brian Gerst