Feb
22
2008
Follow Up: IBM HS21 Blade Processor Mismatch Update
Posted by: Aaron Delp in Bugs, Follow Up, IBM BladesThis is an update to this article on the IBM HS21 BIOS 1.07B.
IBM has confirmed to me that this is a problem that should be addressed in another BIOS patch. The only OS that seems to be affected is Red Hat. According to IBM support, it turns out that the BIOS looks at the stepping levels of the chips and if the second CPU level is different than the fist CPU level, it will “mask” them to the OS so this problem will be avoided.
For some reason, there is a bug in the code as of 1.07B that this doesn’t happen. It has been confirmed and should be corrected shortly.
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Aaron,
Have you got an update for this issue?
A customer of mine is also using HS21 XM with Quad-Core Clovertowns, and ESX 3.5 purple screens to death at a reboot or shutdown. But using ESXi does not cause this issue (no Linux based service console).
-Hugo
Hey Hugo - Sorry for the late reply. The word I received from IBM is that this issue was fixed in the latest version of RedHat and that ESX wasn’t affected. I asked them specifically about the VMWare with you in mind. I didn’t get a chance to test it personally but that is what they tell me.
Aaron,
Thanks. IBM came back with a workaround to my problem, and it appears that what we are experiencing are two different things….All workarounds have been tested and work.
The workarounds then for anyone running ESX 3.5 Build 64607 on HS21 XM 7995 v1.08 with 2 x quad core CPUs:
1. Use ESXi instead (No service console, hence no PSOD. Also no mouse services in the console needed, hence no PSOD (this is the problem that I was experiencing).
2. Use ESX 3.5 Up 1 Build 82663 (Stable as of 18th April - double check your checksums!)
3. Use ESX 3.5 build 64607 but disable the gpm module, do this by entering the following on the Service Console:
chkconfig gpm off
then reboot the host, obviously you will get a PSOD but reset it and all should be well thereafter.
-Hugo
Hugo - All good stuff! Thank you very much for the follow up!!