IBM BladeCenter Deployment Guide
One final note on this item: currently the media tray is required for installing Linux on the blades, but should only be needed in rare circumstances after that. Additionally, since there appear to be several combinations of events that will cause the EFI shell boot option to be restored in the boot sequence on a blade (see item 4), it is recommended that boot sequence be confirmed when an HS40 is rebooted until the firmware fix is released. This can be done by simply confirming that the HS40 boots from the HBA during a restart. So these items should be included as required steps for building a Linux blade.
Modification 2: Leave
Modification 3: When media tray is assigned to a blade, it will automatically hotplug itself and the cdrom and floppy drive will be available for use. When user is done with the cdrom and/or floppy, media tray should be unassigned from the blade and/or the
This step should also be performed when the IBM Remote Disk is used. The IBM Remote Disk is the feature where an image, or even the local floppy or CDROM drive can be mounted on the blade from the local machine.
I have not seen anything to indicate that a Red Hat kernel fix can be completed to prevent these error messages from being generated.
6.floppy.o error messages. Adding 'alias
7.There is a know bug in anaconda which causes the installation of Red Hat 2.1 Update 3 to fail in most cases on an HS40. (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=113346) This is the charming “You’re running me on a live system! That’s incredibly stupid.” message and has been addressed in errata
8.An error message of "pc_key_b: controller malfunction (0xA7)" is seen many times when RHEL 3 is booting during a
9.Linux experiences kernel panics or hangs during boot of 8843 blades. Hang typically happens when reaching net4 frame diverter after 'real time clock driver.'
Fix is to add the
When the BIOS is configured with legacy USB support enabled it can generate a system management interrupt (SMI) during the boot sequence. The BIOS routine which handles that action clobbers a CPU register. That, understandably, is a bad thing as the Linux kernel does not expect its data to be randomly changed by asynchronous events like that SMI. Whether or not the corruption is catastrophic depends on the exact timing of events (down to the microsecond). That's why sometimes the bootup is successful.
10.If you suffer major path problems (LIPs) or controller panics, it can hang the server indefinitely as the system attempts to find a stable path.
11.If there is a path failure and the host is generating I/O, the boot Drive will move to the other path. However, while this transition is occurring, the system will appear to freeze for up to 30 seconds.
12.Mouse support for the BladeCenter unit
The ability of the remote console applet to accurately track the location of the mouse cursor in a Linux X Window System session depends on the configuration of the X Window System. Complete the
32 | © 2006 IBM Version 3.0, 3/10/2006 |
The BladeCenter Deployment Guide is intended as a personal productivity tool. It is not intended to be comprehensive and is provided for
guidance only, on an 'as is basis' without warranty of any kind. Please be aware that its contents have not been certified by IBM.
