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

[Wout Mertens]

Try just attaching a cd drive and running some live cd distro like
knoppix.

Apart from that, are you sure about your memory? Try running memtest86,
you can start it directly as a kernel from syslinux.

I've had some weird memory problems myself, that mostly went away by
downclocking my memory to 266MHz.

Good luck!

Wout.

Yesterday at 23:55 evil squirrels forced Michal Frackowiak to write:

> 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.
>
> the same kernel works fine when loaded from a "hard" media.
>
> I have tried various versions of pxelinux: 2.05, 2.07, 1.76. prhaps I have
> missed sth? kernels 2.6.0-test11 and 2.4.23 as well (but it is not a
> kernel issue).
>
> at the moment I can not remember the version of MBA (I am at home now) -
> will update tomorrow.
>
> I however have no idea how to solve this.
> 1. is it a common behaviour with some hardware configurations? I have
> digged the archives and google but found nothing of that type...
> 2. is there a chance to use pxelinux anyway? I am not sure if the mobo
> provides an option to update the mba...
> 3. does anyone use asus a7v600 with pxelinux???
> 4. any alternative booting way? those diskless nodes do not even have
> floppies... usb pen-drive?
>
> what are the alternatives to pxelinux (bootp?) that could work?
>
> thanx a lot - I am really in need for help...
>
> regards
> michal frackowiak
>
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