[KLUG Members] Not the sharpest tack in the box.

[Adam Williams]

>>>So I found out I'm not the sharpest tack in the box on Tuesday.  An smp
>>>machine has been running with a non-smp kernel for about a year.  OK, I
>>>can fix this, install the smp rpm from the 7.0 cd I have and edit the
>>>lilo.conf file on this RH7.0 box and ...
>>Ha! Oh my..... Heeeehheeee....
>>>This machine has a raid card that uses the ips.o kernel module.  Will I
>>>have to create another initrd.img file with the ips.o module compiled
>>>for smp??
>>Yes! And then you have to reboot!
>>>If so can someone point me in the right direction?
>>mkinitrd! (MaKe INITial Ram Disk)
>>It should turn out to be almost the same size as your current
>>initrd.img.
>>>Ok, you can stop laughing now.
>>Not Yet! Ha! My sides hurt.
>I think I can hear you from here.  One more issue.  I put in a 1GIG stick of
>ram.  The bios recognizes it just fine.  But the dmesg tells me I'm not making
>use of it.
>BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
> BIOS-e820: 0009d000 @ 00000000 (usable)
> BIOS-e820: 5fefce00 @ 00100000 (usable)
>Warning only 896MB will be used.
>896 Arrgghh?#(*&!!!  This should really be 1.5G.  Do I need to pass the kernel
>an argument telling it to use the whole memory?

What model of Netfinity is this?  

It wouldn't hurt to try "mem=" at boot, but I'd torture the machine
afterwords for awhile to make sure it doesn't blow up, as mem= can seem
to work, but then....  Part of the test NEEDs to be generating LOTs of
packets on the network interface as buffering in the stack needs to be
done on physical pages and so will turn up memory problems whereas
simple consumption of virtual/mapped pages by processes may not.  Run
several ping floods with large payloads from a couple of other machines
and something like smbtorture (if you have samba on the box) at the same
time while watching dmesg for complaints from the vm.  Pulling a couple
remote xterms off the box to a remote display and running "ls -lR /" and
"dd if={swap part} of=/dev/null bs=512" is a nice touch too.

Have you flashed to the most current firmware?

Your not mixing registered and unregistered DIMMS, right?  

What kernel are you using?  

Past 1Gb I'd recommend using the "enterprise" RPMs,  they are adjusted
to deal better with oodles o'RAM.