Re: [Xen-users] Xen 4.2.1 boot failure with IOMMU enabled

[Andrew Bobulsky <rulerof@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Povder,

On Jan 13, 2013, at 5:57 AM, povder <povder@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A search of the mailing list brought up a thread from June of 2010,

stating that IOMMU was reported working on the board you have.  You

might want to try a BIOS version that was current at that time, and

work your way forward until it breaks.  The latest BIOS I saw from

that period was 0901.  You could try that and work your way back.

I tried to downgrade BIOS to 0901 version but no matter how hard i tried
various BIOS update utilities won't allow me to downgrade to 0901.
I even took the risk of cutting off power during flashing 3029 version
to install 0901 from BIOS recovery mode but even in recovery mode
I couldn't flash 0901 - I got message "Image is outdated".

I managed to downgrade to various different versions though (starting
from v1006), and I still cannot boot with IOMMU enabled, so I switched
back to v3029.

I'm sorry you weren't able to do that downgrade, but it appears that's actually a good thing.... It looks like the reason you were able to flash 1006 but nothing prior is because that's the first BIOS to support the CPU you have.  At least it prevented you from having to dig a CPU out of a different computer to fix that problem :P

Can I be sure that Xen error message
"(XEN) Xen BUG at pci_amd_iommu.c:35" is caused by a buggy BIOS?

Unfortunately, no.  I only offered it as a suggestion because it's the best one I've got based on my previous experience with 890FX boards.  If you can't chase down any better leads on what could potentially be the cause of this issue, you could grab an older CPU and work the BIOS back down to 0901 to see what happens.  That's more of an academic endeavor than anything else though, as I'm sure you have a 6-core CPU for a reason, of course.

If someone else here isn't able to help---and I'd wager that the lack of replies to this thread are what that means---you could try asking on the Xen-Devel mailing list.  The folks there should be more in tune with what, precisely, the error messages really mean.  Though I'd suggest giving it a day or two just in case that's off-topic... It is the weekend, after all, and someone may yet have an idea here :)

Cheers,

Andrew Bobulsky

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