Good morning.

I'm having a problem with a Tyan Tahoe II motherboard with dual PPro 200 
CPUs (on riser cards) and 128 meg RAM. 

I've been running SuSE 5.3 with a 2.0 kernel on the system for several 
months with no problems. On Thursday I wiped the system and installed SuSE 6.1
with kernel 2.2.5. Everything seemed to come up fine. I configured the 
system for networking, configured X, set up WindowMaker, and had 
everything running. 

Then I decided to roll a new kernel, to make sure SMP was enabled. I 
started with the SuSE provided kernel and ran make xconfig. I went 
through all the options doing normal things (disable experimental items,  
no isdn, sound, irda, infrared, scsi as modules with support for 3 scsi 
cards as modules, networking with 2 network cards as modules, filesystems 
with ext2 enabled and most everything else as modules, and so on).

I am setting the processor as 686/PPro. I've also tried 386 or 486 and it 
also had problems.

One of the first things I noticed was NFS in network file systems. There 
were four options, NFS file system, root filesystem on NFS, kernel 
NFS server, and emulate SUNNFS. Of them, only NFS file system and emulate 
Sun NFS were enabled. The other two were greyed out and I couldn't select 
anything (I would have selected N to both of them anyway).

First, this is the first time I've rolled a 2.2 series kernel. And this 
is the first time I've ever had problems compiling and getting new 
kernels to run. 

The kernel builds properly, though I did have to use bzImage instead of 
zImage, but that's not unusual. Then I build all the modules I wanted and 
install them.

My first mistake was not making a backup of the SuSE provided modules 
(though I can pull them from the CD with no problem) before I installed 
my modules on top of them.

When the system boots I get a neighbour table overflow (?) or out of room 
(?) -- I don't have the system with me right now -- and the rpc process 
will not start, which causes a few errors when booting up with rpc and nfs.

The system otherwise works fine, TCP/IP and networking also work. The 
first time I didn't think anything of it, brought up X, and got to work 
on other things I needed to do. Then I left for the ngiht with xlock 
running. Sometime over the night, the machine hung tight, wouldn't 
respond to ping or telnet, and I had to reset the machine.

I decided I must have a larger problem, so I worked on kernels all day 
yesterday.

Eventually I pulled 2.2.9 and tried it. I generally build a minimal 
kernel with what I need compiled in the kernel, and the few things I 
think I might want later compiled as modules. I don't go through and make 
everything possible as modules. Only what I need. I figure it is better 
to err on the side of caution.

When I got the same problems with 2.2.5 and 2.2.9 I figure it is 
something I'm doing.

I think I'm missing something here. Something I need to have compiled 
in. And knowing me, it is something really stupid and simple.

Does anyone have any insight or advice on things I can do? Has anyone 
else experienced the neighbour table problem? How did you resolve it? I'm 
doing all of this in preparation of a major upgrade and rebuild of my 
production server.

My production server is the same MB and processors, and 256 meg memory. 
It was the first Linux box brought online in an area where IS uses NT 
exclusively, and another group uses Solaris. In both cases, both groups 
are really impressed what I've done with essentially left over hardware. 
So much so I just spent a healthy chunk of change getting a raid 
controller, new processors, and hard drives. We now have a few long-range 
plans in motion that will be using Linux systems in other areas. Linux 
has really proven itself here. Now I'm getting a little nervous.

Should I stay with 2.0 series kernels, with SMP enabled? Or am I missing 
something simple with the 2.2 kernels?

Thanks,
Greg
-
Linux SMP list: FIRST see FAQ at http://www.irisa.fr/prive/mentre/smp-faq/
To Unsubscribe: send "unsubscribe linux-smp" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to