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

[Dirk H Bartley]

Adam Williams wrote:
> 
> >>>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?

4500R, sometimes referred to as an x230

> 
> 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....  

A couple of google searches gave me that thought but I was thinking about trying
that this weekend.

> 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.

In other words beat it really hard.

> 
> Have you flashed to the most current firmware?

Nope.  But the bios recognizes the ram just fine.

> 
> Your not mixing registered and unregistered DIMMS, right?

All dimms were purchased from CDW as certified for this purchase.

> 
> What kernel are you using?

[root@srvbai1 modules]# uname -a
Linux srvbai1 2.2.19-7.0.1smp #1 SMP Tue Apr 10 01:14:05 EDT 2001 i686 unknown
notice the smp (-;

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

Unfortunately there is no smp enterprise rpm on the RH7.0 disk.

Dirk