Fri, 30 Sep 2005
Upgrading to the 2.6.13 kernel
I have tried to upgrade our servers (including the IS MU application cluster) to the latest kernel (2.6.13.2), with a mixed results. Odysseus runs 2.6.13.2 without problems, for example.
However, our quad-Opteron HP DL-585 has failed to detect one of its PCI busses including the fibre-channel HBA on this particular bus. No storage, no boot. And two of the servers in our application cluster had failed to boot - one had misdetected the IRQ for the IDE controller, and the other one was not able to receive IRQs on the ethernet NIC. Later I have found that with CONFIG_ACPI=y the 2.6.14-rc2 kernel boots even on these two hosts. However, when I tried to distribute the 2.6.14-rc2 kernel with CONFIG_ACPI=y to the entire cluster, another two hosts failed to boot (this time they were not able to recevie IRQs from the IDE controller).
The strangest thing is that the application cluster consists of two types of hardware only, and for each of the above failures, there were at least four identical computers which worked without problem. I suspect the problem might be in different BIOS settings or something like that.