[syslinux] Asus A7V600 (3C940 1gb) + Oopsing kernel with PXELINUX

[H. Peter Anvin]

Michal Frackowiak wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> We (an astronomical center) are building a small cluster for our 
> number-crunching. The problem is that we have 12 mobos A7V600 by Asus (for 
> athlons) - 1 server + 11 diskless nodes. And here comes the trouble...
> 
> hardware:
> mobo: a7v600
> net: 1 gigabit by 3com - 3c940, integrated in mobo
> 
> the problem is:
> 
> dhcp - works fine
> tftp - works fine
> pxelinux.0 - downloads fine (I hope)
> linux kernel - downloads and...
> 
> and here begins the lottery. sometimes:
> Uncompressing vmlinux....... crc error, system halted
> 
> sometimes the node uncompresses the kernel and advances in startup, but 
> the kernel makes Oops and produces the stack info during services startup. 
> mostly non-recoverable.
> 
> but sometimes everything seemes to be fine - even the login prompt ;-)
> but the system is corrupted - kernel oopses after some time. for sure will 
> oops when shutting the system down.
> 
> it seems as some part of bios/mba randomly overwrites some part of the 
> kernel or sth alike. this is only my guess.
> 

Once the kernel is started, there should be no BIOS or MBA still running.

The 3Com MBA is definitely one of the most problematic PXE stacks out there.  I would try to find 
the latest version available for your mobo and see if that helps.

	-hpa