Re: 5.0beta won't boot on a Dell Dimension 8400

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 03:59:06PM -0500, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:58:50 +0100
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 08:55:45PM -0500, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> > > I have two almost-identical Dell 8400s.  On one of them, I can't
> > > boot a 5.0beta installation CD from the other day -- I get an NMI
> > > panic.  (The exact version doesn't matter; I haven't been able to
> > > boot any -current for a while.) However, 4.99.72 from August 9 runs
> > > just fine.  Oddly enough, the other one has no trouble booting.
> > > 
> > > If I go into the BIOS and change the disks from AHCI to ATA,
> > > however, I can boot.  The last line printed before the panic is
> > > 
> > >   ahcisata0 port 0: device present, speed: 1.5Gb/s
> > 
> > Can you get a stack trace from here ?
> > 
> No.  When I boot a 5.0beta CD, the keyboard acts like a serial line
> with a speed mismatch: I type 'b' and see three 'y's echoed.  A 't'
> produces a different 3-character sequence: 'yhy'.  I tried booting with
> a USB keyboard connected instead of the usual PS/2; it wouldn't talk at
> all at that point, though it could talk to the boot loader (not
> surprising, I suspect).  When I boot a -current kernel, the PS/2
> keyboard isn't responsive at all.
> 
> The last few lines on the screen (with -current failing) are:
> 
> IPsec: Initialized Security Association Processing
> ahcisata0 port 0: device present, speed: 1.5GB/s
> NMI ... going to debugger
> NStopped in pid 0.2 (system) at  netbsd:sse2_idlezero_page+0x18: jnz
> netbsd:sse2_idlezero_page+0x46
> 
> Is there some kernel option or patch I could try to make the kernel go
> to the backtrace function immediately?  

options DDB_COMMANDONENTER="tr"
in the kernel config file would do it. But in fact I don't think it would
give interesting results, as the NMI seems to be asynchronous; as if some
device did an invalid memory access or something like that.

Do both systems have the same amount of RAM ? how much ?

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--