MSI-K7N2 Delta - general MD bios questions

[Armor Gnome]

I am trying to PXE boot a severely stripped down PC and am getting a lot of errors on the MD side.  I have searched the forums, the wiki and generic ubuntu forums but have not come up with good answers.  Below is my setup, if you have experienced similar please help point me in the right direction. 

MSI K7N2 Delta board
AMD Athlon XP 3000
NVIDIA nForce2 chipset
ATI Radeon AGP 8x (sorry cant remember the series offhand)
PowerSupply and RAM
No floppy, no HDD, no DVD, no PCI cards
Reviewing the manual I assured no jumpers were out of wack
Boot option set to USB, PXE, other boot disabled

My network works fine and I can see this MD make the connection.  The various errors I get are all from the MD to the MD and revolve around the cpu locking up.

BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 61s! [plymouthd:348]

I dug around and found the recommendation to re-seat and verify all my hardware (ram etc) was in place.  I did that and continued to see this error.  Additionally I saw mention of MTU being set to 1500 in the scrolling.  I read an article on the wiki about changing the mtu setting but I am not thinking that is the issue.

I then went to the web-admin on the core and rebuilt the image for this MD, thinking I might have not let it complete.  After a quick reload router I fired the MD again and had this error.  Much much reading later I found some reference to APIC=off and IRQ "static" causing processors to lock.

In this boards bios are settings to disable IRQs, assign priority, turn off apic, and lots of things that I just cant grasp after one day of reading.  I do have the manual however and if someone could share some global settings on MDs that tend to work I would really appreciate it.  I would also appreciate if anyone just say "Guy, that board is ####, find another MD project."

 

[l3mce]

I would pop that ATI out for one. Being AGP I doubt you will have much better performance than the nforce2.

Second, you might try adding  acpi_osi=linux as a grub param as well.


The MTU 1500 nonsense is it attempting to use your NIC. If you receive no errors other than the cpu lock, I would not expect it to be related to that.

*edit   grub... DERP!

[l3mce]

A little nosing around results in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1466577

Of course... we don't really have a grub. If we did, I would drop quiet splash and add radeon.modeset=0 

I am actually not sure how to change kernel params for netboot. I will figure that out and get back to you.

Ok... sussed it.

This will give you the MAC of your individual MDs. Might be convenient to keep track of.

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grep 'ATTR{address}==' /usr/pluto/diskless/*/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
This is where you will find the file to edit:

Code: [Select]

ls /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg
So in my case... I want to edit moon98

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grep 'ATTR{address}==' /usr/pluto/diskless/98/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules/usr/pluto/diskless/98/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules:SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:22:68:06:bc:0a", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

Code: [Select]

ls /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/01-00-01-6c-6f-9b-04  01-00-12-3f-ce-47-33  01-00-22-68-06-bc-0a  01-00-30-18-ad-ee-0a  default

so I would need to edit /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/01-00-22-68-06-bc-0a               as always... backup first please.
DEFAULT Pluto                                                                                                                                                                                             
LABEL Pluto                                                                                                                                                                                               
KERNEL 98/vmlinuz                                                                                                                                                                                         
APPEND initrd=98/initrd.img ramdisk=10240 rw root=/dev/nfs boot=nfs nfsroot=192.168.80.1:/usr/pluto/diskless/98,intr,nolock,udp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,retrans=10,timeo=50 quiet splash video=uvesafb:mode_option=1024x768-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap vmalloc=256m   

I would replace "quiet splash and video=blahblah" with "radeon.modeset=0" and "vga=normal" as well.

So it would read:
APPEND initrd=98/initrd.img ramdisk=10240 rw root=/dev/nfs boot=nfs nfsroot=192.168.80.1:/usr/pluto/diskless/98,intr,nolock,udp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,retrans=10,timeo=50 vga=normal radeon.modeset=0

We are trying to eliminate using the frame buffer. This will take some experimenting... but that is my best guess. vga=normal might be replaced with vga=nofb    but I believe that is for earlier versions of grub...

[Armor Gnome]

Thank you for the info, that will help a lot in future builds.  However unfortunately after failing the pxe boot I reconnected the drives and failed to install any OS, most hung or froze, Windoze gave me a pretty blue glow in my room from that loud screen.  This was one of my first builds so I will hang onto it and try to revive it in time.  For now though I need to gut that case and get something back into that rack slot. 

Let that be a lesson to me and to anyone else trying to "give lmce a shot", use hardware you know works.