Re: number of CPUs and IPI panic

Nik Azim Azam wrote:

>--- Stephan Uphoff <ups_at_tree.com> wrote:
>
>> OK - now we have to play the thousand questions game
>>
>>;-)
>>
>>This happens after the system is up?
>>Can you send me the startup messages (With verbose
>>enabled)? Are there known issues with other operating systems?
>>Do you have a serial console / serial line for gdb / firewire for debugging ?
>>
>>If I read your first posting correctly you have 6 pentium II overdrive processors in your system (overdrive = PII with PPRO
>>pinout).
>>Can you supply information about the vendor / chipset of your system?
>>    
>>
Forgive me for being a little behind the curve, been a bit busy the past 
few days.

To answer some of your questions Stephan;
The ALR Revolution 6x6 is a 6-way PPro; it uses two processor cards and 
a SIMM or DIMM memory card. The processor cards contain partial BIOS, 
VRMs, and CPUs (obviously.) They come in 1 through 3-way flavors. These 
will -always- label the last processor as BSP; this is a hack so that 
the installation socket is irrelevant. (ie; I can have one CPU in the 
3rd socket of a 3-way board, and the system will boot.) The system in 
question here is undoubtedly a Unisys Aquanta HS/6 or HR/6. A genuine 
ALR has no mention of Unisys in MPTable. The board has two distinct PCI 
buses in addition to the EISA bus, which we do not appear to be 
detecting correctly. In addition, we appear to erroneously detect a pcic 
device; this may be the keyboard/mouse card. (Please forgive, my memory 
is somewhat fuzzy.)
The amount of logic on the motherboard is nothing short of staggering; 
the core is indeed i440GX Orion. HOWEVER, take a look at this picture:
http://www.vanvleet.net/images/rev6x6bd.gif
To the left of the single shared PCI/EISA slot are the PCI controllers. 
Between them is a crystal, and above is a NatSemi SuperI/O (I believe.) 
BOTH controllers are FULL southbridge chips. As you look between the CPU 
slots and Memory slot, you should find two FULL i440GX's. That's not a 
mistake; part of the ALR's magic is that the maximum number of PPros on 
a chipset is 4; to get around this, they used two. I tried to find a 
better picture to be more certain of the identification, but no such 
luck I'm afraid, and the ALR's I have access to are running and can't be 
disassembled.

We have a very big problem here though; we're detecting 7 processors. 
The ALR has a LOT of on-board logic. Handling it is very tricky; these 
things required a special version of Windows NT or SCO, as I recall. We 
should only be detecting 6 CPUs; we may be erroneously accepting part of 
the bridging logic as a processor. (ISTR that the CPU board bridge 
appears very similar to a processor.) I think an mptable dump would be 
very helpful here; I'm wondering if we're not letting the board fake us 
out with bridge logic presenting as a processor.

-Ketrien I. Saihr-Kesenchedra / ketrien_at_error404.nls.net