RHEL3.9 smp kernel panics during booting while changing APIC ID

Issue

System with a dual xeon intel processor and with the last kernel 2.4.21-63.ELsmp, the IO-apic initialization generates kenel panic. The boot process snip:

ENABLING IO-APIC IRQs 
Setting 8 in the phys_id_present_map 
...changing IO-APIC physical APIC ID to 8 ... ok. 
Setting 9 in the phys_id_present_map 
...changing IO-APIC physical APIC ID to 9 ... ok. 
Setting 10 in the phys_id_present_map 
...changing IO-APIC physical APIC ID to 10 ...<0>Kernel panic: could not set ID!