Fedora 8 and Dual Opterons - Seg Fault During Boot

[Rick Bilonick]

On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 19:40 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 12:36 -0500, Rick Bilonick wrote:
> > I have a 64-bit dual opteron system that has run Fedora 3, 4, 5, 6, and
> > 7. I installed Fedora 8 (install not upgrade, default partitions) - no
> > problems of any kind were reported. When I rebooted to bring up the
> > system, a seg fault message starts repeating after the boot process has
> > progressed a short way.
> > 
> > Previously, I had tried running the KDE and Gnome live distributions -
> > but for some reason, the display was unusable. I put in a Fedora 7 live
> > dvd and it boots up and displays without any problem. The computer has
> > an ATI Technologies RV280 (Radeo 9200 SE] display.
> > 
> > Any ideas?
> > 
> > Rick B.
> > 
> 
> Can you redirect the output to a serial console [1] and post the output?
> I've got a large number of dual/quad x dual-core Opteron machines
> running flawlessly. (Fedora 7/8, RHEL 4/5, CentOS 4/5.)
> 
> - Gilboa

OK, I haven't done the console but I did try to install the Fedora 7
64-bit (it was running the 32-bit Fedora 7 previously). Fedora 7
installs without a problem but, again, would get a kernel panic on
reboot. The error messages seemed to suggest it could not find the root
file system because it was confused about harddrives. The system has a
raid drive (someone else installed it some time ago) so I removed the
power and tried to install Fedora 8 again. This time Fedora 8 boots OK,
lets me set up a new user, etc. But now for some reason the video
display is screwed up. It looks like an old analog television - it jumps
around, is not stable and is unreadable. I can get to a shell console.
The /etc/X11/xorg.conf file shows it is using the radeon driver which
would seem reasonable given it has a Radeon 9200 SE video adapter. The
monitor is a Dell P1110 which will do upto 1600x1200.

I saw a suggestion to use ATI's proprietary fglrx driver, but from what
I can tell, it doesn't support cards 9250 or below. I don't understand
how going from F7 (which has no problem with the ATI 9200 card) to F8
could break this.

Rick B.