The header tells it all: on my dual-P233MMX system the error messages get annoying: "APIC Error on CPU0" (or CPU1), and on one heavy system build the system crashed. I GOOGLEd around just to find that this APIC errors seem to be caused by a buggy SMP handling of my board's BIOS. My old slackware & kernel 2.2.something never threw this at me, but now... gentoo does :-) (maybe because of the 2.4.19 kernel I use) Just to list the suggested (non working) solutions found elsewhere: 1) set SMP protocol version to 1.1 (no chance, no BIOS switch to do that) 2) get the newest BIOS for this board (I have the latest - V3.43 from 1997) Has anyone a clue what I could do to get around this trouble? Any switches to try at boot time, secret rituals to perform at the terminal, patches? I'll try linuxbios.org after this bug report - maybe they have a completely new BIOS for this old board. Or I could get an older 2.2 kernel as mentioned in the INSTALL GUIDE. Anyway - this is my last hope before wrecking the board :-(
Well, it seems to be a kernel-issue. Alan Cox writes something in his changelog. o Hopefully fix the smp boot/apic problem (James Cleverdon) http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=103035849204944&w=2 This one is not merged into the main tree until now. You should try an ac-kernel and see if this fixes the issue.
what kernel specifically were you using? have you tried the latest gentoo-r9 kernel?
Thanks for the suggestion to try out the AC kernel - as this is not too urgent (2 other boxes running gentoo without trouble), I'm going to wait for the 2.4.20 release. The kernel I was using was the plain vanilla 2.4.19. I'm going to wait, update, re-test and eventually set this bug to FIXED, when 2.4.20 (or up) will cure this. I seem the only one with this antique board, anyway :-) Thanks again - it feels fine to have helping hands around. Cheers, Ralf
To the reporter: Is this still a problem or can we close this bug?
Well, I installed 2.4.20 and still have spurious "APIC error on CPU1: 04(00)" or "APIC error on CPU0: 02(00)". Hmmm, how could I apply the AC patches to the kernel? Sorry for this stupid question, but I had been patching my way through the 0.x up to 2.2.x kernels - and never applied one of the famous AC changes :-) Will I have to rename (symlink) my current 2.4.20 directory to linux.vanilla? If anybody cares, please send me a pointer to a FAQ, please. Ho, Ho, Ho, Ralf
emerge ac-sources we have an ebuild for it to save you the trouble :)
Hi there, switching the system to kernel 2.4.20-ac2 seems to have cured the annoying APIC bug. I was busy updating my system to gentoo 1.4 (took over one week up to now... made me nearly jump out of my window, lucky me - my shack is in the basement; gcc 3.2.1 from the 1.4rc package wouldn't compile; this ruined my stage1 and stage2 setup attempts. Now I'm using a stage3 tarball (rc2) and will tweak the system to optimize it for Dual-233MMX later :-) Will run some stress tests with heavy CPU load (SETI and/or RC5-72) and I/O over the SCSI i/f (DAT copying etc) - but from my POV, this bug is GONE. Thanks for the help, Ralf BTW: happy new year!
