laptop keeps rebooting in installcd system. it is not load-related. laptop: FJS Amilo Pi 3525 cpu: Intel P7350 chipset: Intel GM45 ram: 4GB DDR2 800MHz hdd: WD Scorpio Blue 250GB lan: Realtek RTL8101E/8102E 100mbps NIC gentoo minimal amd64 cd (install-amd64-minimal-20090423.iso) reboots every time it starts autoconfiguration of devices. "gentoo-nofb acpi=off nosmp" gives it a chance to boot, but eventualy it reboots after few minutes. "gentoo-nofb acpi=off nosmp nodetect" boots the system without any power management, drivers nor anything. in that case, system works (seems like stable) until I try to modprobe r8169. then it crashes. install-amd64-minimal-20090423.iso uses kernel 2.6.27 is there any way to get some installcd version that will give usable system running on FJS Amilo Pi 3525? problem explained in details here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1137153
Have you tried the latest amd64 autobuild that was built yesterday? http://gentoo.osuosl.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/20090507/install-amd64-minimal-20090507.iso If that still doesn't work for you, there's nothing we can do. It's obviously an upstream kernel issue if the Ubuntu media experiences the same problems.
same happens with install-amd64-minimal-20090507.iso http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD_hTH3HHDs except "nodetect" boot option results in missing cdrom drive so system cannot boot at all. fixing this (I guess) RTL8101E/8102E problem would be quite important in long term. what would be the right way to report it upstream?
CCing the kernel team.
so in the usable configuration, "modprobe r8169" causes an instant reset? Or is there an error message, hang, or something else?
module is loaded without any error message and for a moment everything seems right (I'm back in the shell). couple of seconds leter system reboots.
any chance of hooking up a serial console?
never done that. my laptop has no serial port. any way to do that without COM port?
you could try netconsole if you had another network card...seems unlikely though!
no other network card, just wireless. is there any way wifi can help?
maybe worth a try using netconsole with that, but i'm skeptical if it could output the messages early enough
the situation is developing, but there's still no clear answer: http://forum.de.ts.fujitsu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=39045 citation by neolojik from that tread: ===================================== From my testing I found that I could reliably run a 64bit version of Linux either of these ways: 1) Booting with mem=4096m. This unfortunately causes the loss of the final 1GB of RAM which is allocated just after the 4GB boundary. 2) Booting with acpi=off. This disables all power saving and the ability to access thermal data, battery information and throttle the CPU. You can access all 4GB of RAM though. 3) Booting normally, but prevent the "processor" and "thermal" modules from loading. This leaves you with a half-working ACPI interface. You can access all ACPI information except for temperature data and CPU data. CPU throttling doesn't work. Perhaps the issue does lie with the Realtek card, I don't know and I don't have any way to try and find out. Unfortunately I believe the only way to be certain would be for Fujitsu to fix it (which seems unlikely), for someone to physically remove the device from the motherboard (voiding their warranty, and likely damaging their motherboard in the process) or to disable it via the BIOS (which isn't possible as most of the options are hidden). I have looked into editing the BIOS but the Pi 3525 doesn't actually have a BIOS in the traditional sense. The BIOS (or rather, firmware) is called Phoenix SecureCore which is actually based on UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). UEFI / EFI is the new generation of firmware which solves a lot of old legacy problems. Going into further details would be a bit beyond the scope of this post, but google is your friend if you want to know more. Regardless, the Phoenix BIOS editor won't open this new type of firmware so we can't un-hide all the hidden options. Unfortunately I know of no other way to hide a device from the Linux kernel. As I said though; I'm happy with a PAE enabled 32bit kernel. Everything seems to be working just fine and I can access the full 4GB of RAM (minus the 32MB of GFX memory of course). 64bit has no benefit for me. Though I do hope that Fujitsu change their minds and correct the problem. ===================================== so, I guess I'll have to find out is it better to run 32-bit Linux with 4GB of RAM or 64-bit Linux with 3GB of RAM... :(
seems it was BIOS-related bug: http://forum.de.ts.fujitsu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=39045 update to BIOS version 1.10C solved the problem for me and majority users.
