AMD64 Install Lockups

[EzInKy]

Hardware:

Motherboard: Tyan Thunder K8W 2885
CPUs: 2 Dual Core Opteron 285s.
Memory: 8GB DDR Reg Ram
Video: ATI X800 Radeon AGP
Hard Drives: 2 500GB PATA, 4 750GB SATA

The machine currently runs Gentoo ~amd64 (unstable branch) and Debian Sid amd64. It also boots fine with Feisty amd64, Debian Lenny amd64 netinstall, and the Kubuntu Gutsy i386 CDs. The Gutsy amd64 CD, however, locks up during the install process. Both normal and safe graphical options begin with the progress bar, then go to a black screen that briefly flashes a message "Cannot allocate resource..." but the message disappears so fast that it was too difficult to determine resource could not be allocated.

Modifying the boot command to boot without "splash" and "quiet" does allow the boot process to continue long enough to identify the non-allocated resource as PCI 04, but the machine then hard locks entering graphical mode. Interestingly enough, lspci in Gentoo identifies 04:00 as the AMD-8151 System Controller and 04:01 and the AMD-8151 AGP Bridge.

My best guess for this issue is that support for the AMD chipset of this common server board was not built into the kernel of the amd64 install CD, but I was not able to find a kernel config file on the disc to confirm this.

[dibl]

Re: AMD64 Install Lockups

Does it boot and run the Gutsy Beta live CD (AMD64 version) satisfactorily? If "yes", then the problem is probably with the video display, handling the splash screen, or something like that, unrelated to the 64-bit architecture. You might try playing with the "VGA" modes in the options.

[EzInKy]

Re: AMD64 Install Lockups

Does it boot and run the Gutsy Beta live CD (AMD64 version) satisfactorily? If "yes", then the problem is probably with the video display, handling the splash screen, or something like that, unrelated to the 64-bit architecture. You might try playing with the "VGA" modes in the options.

I took a different route and tried the Ubuntu Server CD. It gave the same error but since it booted in text mode I was able to complete the install. When I booted the Ubuntu partition there were no PCI errors and lspci showed everything detected correctly and after installing xorg and copying the config from my Gentoo partition X started up flawlessly. As I stated in my original post there were no such issues with either the Gutsy i386 or the Feisty AMD64 CDs.

[dibl]

Re: AMD64 Install Lockups

Interesting -- well, I'm glad it installed, one way or another. The fact that it worked in character mode still suggests that the impediment is somehow related to graphical mode, to me, but who knows?

[EzInKy]

Re: AMD64 Install Lockups

Interesting -- well, I'm glad it installed, one way or another. The fact that it worked in character mode still suggests that the impediment is somehow related to graphical mode, to me, but who knows?

Well, being that I have a couple of other Linux distros that run flawlessly on this machine and can successfully boot and run the install procedure of even more I'm not so sure about that. Still, this is a beta so hopefully these issues will be fixed before the release next week.

[EzInKy]

Re: AMD64 Install Lockups

I ran into some more issues after the install. My machine would either experience more lock ups or reboot itself when inside a graphical environment. Since I have never experienced such problems when booting into my Debian Sid or Gentoo partitions I built a new kernel using my Gentoo .config and now everything seems to be working fine, except for errors trying to configure laptop-support and power-management. Naturally since this machine is not a laptop the Gentoo .config does not have support for power management selected so perhaps this is where the problem with the ubuntu kernel lies.