Long delay or kernel panic when booting RHEL4 - IBM System x3950, x3950 E, xSeries 460, xSeries MXE 460

Resolving The Problem

Source

RETAIN tip: H195219

Symptom

When booting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Update 4 (U4) on one of the Affected Items, there may either be a pause for approximately 5 to 60 minutes (delay may vary from time to time) or kernel panic during the Operating System (OS) boot process while the following text is displayed on the screen:

Affected configurations

The system may be any of the following IBM servers:

• System x3950 E, type 8874, any model
• System x3950 E, type 8879, any model
• System x3950, type 8872, any model
• System x3950, type 8878, any model
• xSeries 460, type 8872, any model
• xSeries MXE-460, type 8874, any model

The system is configured with at least one of the following:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, any update

This tip is not option specific.

Note: This does not imply that the network operating system will work under all combinations of hardware and software. Please see the compatibility page for more information: http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/serverproven/compat/us/

Workaround

Update the RHEL kernel to 2.6.9-89.0.7.ELlargesmp (kernel-largesmp-2.6.9-89.0.7.EL.x86_64.rpm) or above.

If there is difficulty booting the OS to update the RHEL kernel, try either of the following:

1. While the Linux GRUB loader is displayed on the screen, hit the arrow key from the keyboard and select to boot with the uni-processor kernel instead of the largesmp kernel.
   
   
2. Reduce the total physical memory to 88 Gigabytes (GB) or less.
   

Additional information

This is a RHEL issue fixed by the linux-2.6.9-fix-cast-in-time-keeping-code.patch, which modifies handling of timer_interrupt().

Consult with software support services for more details.