Bug 71333

Summary:	LiveCD: Frequent crashes and lockups on SunBlade 150
Product:	Gentoo Release Media	Reporter:	Aaron Williams <aaronw>
Component:	Everything	Assignee:	Gentoo LiveCD Package Maintainers <livecd>
Status:	RESOLVED NEEDINFO
Severity:	critical	CC:	sparc
Priority:	Highest
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Sparc
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Aaron Williams 2004-11-15 15:55:08 UTC

I just downloaded the 2004.3 sparc64 release and am attempting to install it on a Sunblade 150 with 768MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive installed.  While I can get farther than I did than the previous release, it is still highly unstable.  This is with both the minimal and universal live CDs.


1. At least 50% of the time it locks up when it attempts to mount the cdrom.  The only way to recover is to power cycle.  It hangs at the line "Attempting to mount CD:- /newroot/dev/cdroms/cdrom0

2. Whenever I attempt to mount a ext3 filesystem the system crashes unless I first manually load the ext3 module (modprobe ext3).  It sometimes crashes when loading this module.

3. If I can mount the file system, the system frequently crashes whenever doing disk access (i.e. untarring files).

I have tried turning off dma (hdparm -d 0 /dev/hda) but this makes no difference.

Note that this is on a stock Sunblade 150, no extra hardware has been installed.

Comment 1 Jason Wever (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2004-11-16 20:42:37 UTC

Try passing the boot argument "ide=nodma" to the kernel you choose.  The IDE controller in the Blades lacks the ability to checksum, so if DMA is on at all anywhere it can create havoc.

Comment 2 Jason Wever (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2005-03-06 19:37:30 UTC

Need more info to figure out if ide=nodma worked or not.