Re: bnx driver in 5.99.7 panics under xen 3.3.1

[Mike Bowie <mbowie%buzmo.com@localhost>]

Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 07:34:48AM -0800, Mike Bowie wrote:
>>> Hi Martti,
>>>
>>> The issue isn't quite resolved at my end.  I'm afraid dom0 has only
>>> booted for me twice now, it seems to stall once the kernel passes to
>>> init.  It's entirely possible that it's a separate issue, but I've not
>>> managed to figure anything out at all just yet.
>>>
>>> That said, the howto would certainly benefit from some notes on using
>>> boot vs grub and a mention that reducing Xen's RAM may resolve similar
>>> issues.
>>>
>>> Mike.
>> Sorry for the steady stream of noise, but I found this morning that the
>> init process is actually progressing, albeit *extremely* slowly.  It
>> took about four hours to get so far as to bring up the network
>> interface.  It's at about eleven hours now and it still hasn't started sshd.
> 
> it looks like an interrupt storm. you may want to try playing with the
> acpi options ...
> 

Sadly, my hacking over the weekend has not proven all that successful.
Adding "acpi=off" and a dom0 kernel without ACPI has allowed dom0 to
boot, but not reliably.  It does appear to be an interrupt storm, but I
don't know what more I can do to calm it.

When the machine *does* boot, I'm unable to login on the serial console,
as just entering a username will grind the machine to a halt.  If I
login via ssh, top shows interrupts constantly between 7% and 15% and
the machine's responsiveness is sluggish to say the least.

Xen's inability to reboot this box makes it a bit of a dog to
troubleshoot too; it would probably be easier if it was local rather
than at the co-lo.  Each crash requires that I reset the remote DRAC
card (because the interrupt storms seem to disable it's com port) wait
for it to come back up and issue a hard reset before returning to a
plain NetBSD kernel.

Any suggestions as to where I can progress from here?

Many thanks,

Mike.