[PlanetCCRMA] FC4 SMP kernels won't boot

[Michael Gurevich]

Hi,

I just did a fresh install of FC4 and PlanetCCRMA. The machine is a little 
weird - it has Dual Xeons with HT enabled and a SCSI BIOS/Boot ROM 
thingie whose purpose I don't really understand. But we get along alright 
and I don't think this is related to the problem. The SCSI HD has WinXP on 
it, but I can dual boot from GRUB on an IDE drive which also has the FC4 
install. 

The boot seems to start okay, gets to runlevel 5 and freezes on:

Bringing up interface eth0

Just now I left it at this stage for about 5 minutes and got:
BUG: Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer at virtual address 0000008
then it went all Matrix on me with junk scrolling down the screen. If I 
do the Fedora interactive startup and skip loading the module the rest of 
the boot goes normally. I know this isn't very helpful to diagnose what 
the problem is but I'm not sure where to look. Is it possible to log what 
happens in the kernel during a failed boot? /var/log/dmesg doesn't contain 
anything noteworthy and /var/log/boot.log is empty.

This happens with the smp kernels 2.6.13-0.3.rdt.rhfc4.ccrmasmp and 
2.6.12-0.21.rdt.rhfc4.ccrmasmp but the uni-processor versions of these 
kernels boot and run smoothly.

cheers,
Michael.