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Monday, July 25, 2005
Linux: Fedora Core 3 Kernel 2.6.12-1.1372_FC3smp Doesn't Boot
After 8 days running the single-processor 2.6.12-1.1372_FC3 kernel on the server farm management machine (a re-purposed Dell Inspiron laptop configured, from a software standpoint, identically to the dual processor hyper-threaded server machines), I installed the multi-processor version of this kernel, 2.6.12-1.1372_FC3smp on the "pathfinder" server. When I attempted to reboot it to install this kernel, the reboot crashed with a kernel panic early in the reboot process (well before any damage was done to file systems). I power cycled the machine, reverted to the earlier 2.6.11-1.35_FC3smp kernel, and all was well. This appears to be a known problem. This bug report describes precisely the symptoms I encountered. I haven't tried booting the single processor kernel on the pathfinder server since production servers need to be able to use all processors to handle the load.Posted at July 25, 2005 00:18