Bug 15384 – kernel BUG at apic.c:288! / Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Bill Gray 2003-02-09 14:58:48 UTC]

Trying to boot gentoo-grp-i686-1.4_rc2 install CD on
an old digital PRIORIS XL 6200 (200 Mhz PPro). Splash
sceen and boot prompt work fine; kernel panic soon
after proceeding to boot.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Just try to boot from the CD
2. "noapic" option doesn't seem to make any difference
3.

Actual Results:  
typed in from console boot log:

CPU0: Intel Pentium Pro stepping 09
per-CPU timeslice cutoff: 733.84 usecs.
SMP motherboard not detected.
kernel BUG at apic.c:288!
invalid operand: 0
CPU: 0
EIP: 10:[<80396c59>] Not tainted
EFLAGS: 10246
eax: f ebx: 23796 ecx: ffffffff edx: 0
esi: ddb698 edi: c6 ebp: 10624dd3 esp: 8038dfbc
ds: 18 es: 18 ss: 18
Process swapper (pid: 0, stackpage=8038d000)
Stack: ff 23796 ddb698 80397299 8039530e 80303fe0 24 802fe7b8
59800 0 4e000 8038e2ab bc614e 803b53c0 0 80105000
801001c9
Call Trace:

Code: f b 20 1 77 a 30 80 b8 ff ff ff ff 87 5 e0 e0 ff ff bb
 <0>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!
In idle task - not syncing


Expected Results:  
booted and began install

Same issue seems present in RH 8.0
but RH 7.3 seems to work on this system.

[Comment 1 SpanKY 2003-02-09 16:23:31 UTC]

god i love the BUG() function 

[Comment 2 Aron Griffis (RETIRED) 2003-02-16 21:53:33 UTC]

Is anybody on the kernel team actually looking into this bug?
Could it be fixed by disabling IO-APIC support in the ISO kernel
and using only XT-PIC?  This would mean that the ISO kernel
would only support uniprocessor...  Alternatively is it possible
to supply two kernels on the ISO image, one for SMP and one 
works-on-everything uniprocessor kernel?

Does anybody have suggestions to workaround this bug so Bill can
install?  For example, is it possible to boot from a RH 7.x CD
(do they use 2.4.x kernels?) to bootstrap?  Any hints on how to 
go about that?

[Comment 3 Aron Griffis (RETIRED) 2003-02-19 11:05:18 UTC]

Bill, this bug doesn't seem to be getting a lot of attention...  ;-)
I know our kernel guys are pretty busy working on getting 1.4 out the
door.

For your situation, I'd suggest:

1. pull the hard drive and stick it in another (faster) machine
2. install Gentoo and build the kernel without IO-APIC support
3. move the hard drive back

Aron

[Comment 4 Aron Griffis (RETIRED) 2003-02-25 07:35:17 UTC]

I asked Bill to give the following URL a try:

www.gentoo.org/~livewire/livecd-x86-xfs-sources_pre6.iso

He reported back to me that this kernel properly boots his system.  Now the 
question is whether or not this kernel will appear on the 1.4 CD.

[Comment 5 Bob Johnson (RETIRED) 2003-02-25 07:54:26 UTC]

 
why was this assigned to [e-mail] (this new?)  
  

[Comment 6 Aron Griffis (RETIRED) 2003-02-25 07:59:09 UTC]

I don't know why it was assigned to release.  How should x86 kernel issues
generally be assigned?

[Comment 7 Bob Johnson (RETIRED) 2003-02-25 10:45:33 UTC]

livecd kernel issues should be assigned to me,  
all other kernel issues should be assigned to kernel maintainer 
ie: gentoo-sources to lostlogic 
    xfs-sources to me 

[Comment 8 Bob Johnson (RETIRED) 2003-04-20 11:08:23 UTC]

resolved