Re: Boot issues with a Dell Inspiron 530 and 8.0 RC1

Christian Schmidt wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> I am seeing a strange issue with my Dell Inspiron 530 with 8.0 RC1-p1
> at around 50-75% percent of all boots. It all boils down to GENERIC
> throwing the following:
>
> AP #1 (PHY #1) failed!
> panic y/n? [y] panic: bye-bye
> cpuid = 0
>
> However, this only happens when booting from the hard disk. A boot
> from the install CD works perfectly every time. Testing the machine
> with 7.2 last night revealed the same issue, so this is not specific
> to 8.0
> As an interesting side-note: the odds of a successful boot increase
> dramtically when cold-booting. Rebooting from e.g. Linux or Windows
> seems to push the failure-rate to around a 100% every time.
>   

We have 3 of these machines.

In my experience, keyboard activity triggers the problem.  If I boot the 
machine without any keyboard presses/releases between the time the 
loader starts the kernel and some time later, definitely by the time the 
USB keyboard driver attaches, then I don't get this problem.  This 
includes any key-up (and maybe key repeat) events you may generate after 
typing a key at the boot menu, or after typing enter at the OK prompt, 
or pressing a key to bypass the autoboot timeout that counts down by 
seconds.

If you let the machine start from cold without touching the keyboard, 
what happens?

If you get to the loader "ok " prompt, then enter "autoboot" and wait 
for it to time out and boot, what happens?

If you press a key or type "boot" to boot the machine while in the 
loader, what happens?

There's been some discussion of SMI-related problems and the long time 
SMI interrupts take on some machines; my guess is that this is related 
to that.

  --jh