I've been trying to install gentoo 1.1a on an Intel L440GX+ motherboard with dual built-in Adaptec 7896 SCSI controllers (which are unused) and a Mylex DAC960-based PCI RAID card (which has 5 disks in a RAID 0 config). When autodetecting the PCI cards, it detects the Adaptec controllers first and then proceeds to take 10 (!) minutes to try to detect every possible connection on both controllers. After this, it comes to the prompt. I type in "modprobe DAC960". It loads the module, shows the module info, and then freezes without detecting the card or the disks. I have researched this problem, as Red Hat 7.2 and Mandrake 8.2 would not install either. (FreeBSD and Windows 2000 installed.) The trick for Red Hat and Mandrake is to type "linux apic" at the install prompt. That turns on IO- APIC and makes everything agreeable. I tried this with the gentoo cd (both "linux apic" and "rescue apic") and neither works. I have been told on the mailing lists that it appears that APIC is not compiled in the install kernel for gentoo. It appears that APIC is necessary to install linux of any flavor on these motherboards.
Yes, I removed APIC because it kills Dell Inspiron laptops. I can add support for it back, but disable it by default with noapic. I'll do this for the next CD and I'll keep this bug open until it's officially fixed.
Thanks for the quick reply and for the forthcoming fix. Looking forward to getting gentoo on this box.
I saw that Gentoo 1.2 is out. I downloaded it and tried "rescue apic" on it, but it still doesn't work. Is there a reason why it was left out of 1.2, or am I doing something wrong?
No new information here, just a heads up that this affects quite a few of the old va-linux models making gentoo quite uninstallabe without jumping through some hoops ;)
go to http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/experimental/livecd/ and download a CD with a date of "20021221" or later. These CDs have APIC auto-enabled, and will continue to work this way. People with APIC issues can type "gentoo noapic" at the boot prompt. Closing this bug :)
Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux". I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers, this is the only reasonable way to do this.