Cisco M5 Servers RHEL errata guidance

Environment:

• Cisco M5 Servers
  • C220 M5
  • C240 M5
  • B200 M5

Note:

The systems in the environment section of this article have been certified with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3. Since that time the following defects impacting these systems have been discovered and resolved. While updating to the latest available errata is always recommended, users will want to update their installations to at least the following errata to address these defects:

• Errata RHBA-2016:2862
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux in some cases failed to boot on platforms due to High Performance Event Timer (HPET) clock access contention. On systems with a Time Stamp Counter (TSC) clock and an HPET, the HPET is used to calibrate the TSC. On some large CPU count systems, this in some cases led to access contention on HPET, which caused a system lockup followed by Nonmaskable Interrupt (NMI) softlockup watchdog. This update reduces HPET counter read contention, thus fixing this bug. As a result, Red Hat Enterprise Linux now boots as expected on affected platforms. (BZ#1388597)
• Errata RHBA-2017:0082
  • Previously, the X.org server failed to start on machines with 32-bit PCI domains. A PCI domain does not need to be limited to the 16-bits. The Linux kernel currently supports 32-bit domains, which cause the startx utility to fail with segmentation fault. However, updating libpciaccess to support 32-bit domains breaks the library's application binary interface (ABI), and domains that require 32-bits are not necessary for startx. Therefore, this patch ignores these domains, and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#1401462)