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

[Michal Frackowiak]

thanx for all the replies. this indeed was a &^@#(* memory problem. you 
just can not simply put 2*512 mb modules and require them to work at 400 
mhz although they are ddr400 ;-) downclocking to 333 solved the problem 
for now although that is not what we want...

anyway, I report mobo asus a7v600 with bios-integrated mba to work 
perfectly with pxelinux!

regards - michal



Wout Mertens wrote:

>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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