Some Special Help for IBM Servers

When using Deployment Solution to roll out new IBM x3850 servers, the Linux PE environment received an interesting error when attempting to boot:

'badness in do_exit at kernel/exit.c'

This particular server had 16 processors. Apparently the Linux kernel configured for this boot process was unable to correctly address multiple processors.

Fortunately, this was a fairly simple fix. Deploying the image was not really a multi-processor critical operation. By adding the 'maxcpus=1' statement, as defined below, the kernel was then configured to only operate using one CPU. This resolved the problem.

In the MISC folder

--freeldr.ini

CommandLine="root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=32768 maxcpus=1"

--isolinux.cfg

default linux
label linux
 kernel linux
 append initrd=rootfs.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=262144 quiet pci=routeirq pci=nommconf maxcpus=1

--pxelinux.cfg

default linux
label linux
 kernel linux
 append initrd=rootfs.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=262144 quiet pci=routeirq pci=nommconf maxcpus=1
 ipappend 2

--syslinux.cfg

default linux
label linux
 kernel linux
 append initrd=rootfs.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=262144 quiet pci=routeirq pci=nommconf maxcpus=1