AMD "Lisbon" (Opteron 4100-series) systems will panic when booting the x86 (32bit) Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 kernel

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • RHEL 5.5

  • D1 stepping versions of AMD Opteron 4100-series processors

Issue

  • AMD "Lisbon" (Opteron 4100-series) systems will panic when booting the x86 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 kernel. The x86_64 architecture installs on these platforms and boots properly.

Resolution

  • A fix is available in a RHEL 5.5+ erratum. The erratum announcement may be found at the following URL link:

            https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2010:0398

  • Customers wanting to run x86 kernels on AMD Lisbon platforms will need to install RHEL 5.4 x86 and then upgrade to RHEL5.5+ erratum in that order. Please contact your Red Hat Support representative for further details on the 5.5+ errata release.

  • The workaround described above will be the best solution to the issue until the release of RHEL 5.6. This is because Red Hat does not respin update release ISOs to include fixes that have been released in subsequent errata. The first install media that will contain the fix in the listed errata will be the RHEL 5.6 discs and ISOs.

  • Only "D1" stepping versions of this processor are affected. To verify if a processor is affected by this issue, go to the following URL and select "View Detail" next to the Model of the suspect processor. If the Revision is "D1," the processor is affected and the work around above is required.

http://products.amd.com/en-us/OpteronCPUResult.aspx?f1=AMD+Opteron%E2%84%A2+4100+Series+Processor

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