| Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server Product Notes |    
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| C H A P T E R 3 |
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Software Issues |
This chapter describes software issues related to the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server. The numbers given in the section titles are internal tracking numbers for change requests related to the issues.
This chapter includes the following topics:
ESX/ESXi 4.0 displays incorrect information about the Sun Fire X4600 processor family in the /proc/vmware/cpuinfo file. The correct family number is 16, and ESX 4.0 displays 15.
This issue does not affect server or ESX functionality.
If a Dual Port U320 SCSI Fibre Channel HBA (XPCIE2SCSIU320Z) is installed, the vmnic number changes from 0 to 11.
Memory errors occur when 8-GB DIMMs are used with VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1. Use of 8-GB DIMMs with systems running these or previous versions of ESX is not supported. If vSwitch0 uses the default mapping to vmnic0, the network interface ceases to work.
The following messages generated by VMware ESX have little or no impact on system availability or performance.
To identify physical PCI slots in the Solaris OS, insert a PCI card in each slot one-by-one, and record the corresponding path information.
The following example shows the output for a system with Solaris 10 10/9 and BIOS 129:
The display might be different with a different OS and BIOS.
When loading the drivers for the following adapter cards on a server running Solaris 10 5/09:
you might encounter the following error message:
WARNING: nxge : ==> nxge_rxdma_databuf_free: DDI
This message can be safely ignored.
Support for the following PCI Express cards is limited to Solaris 10 and Linux operating systems.
| Note - These adapter cards are not supported for Windows 2008 Server R2 andVMware ESX 4.0 and ESXi 4.0. |
A Solaris OS install under VMware with the recommended minimum virtual memory (512 MB) and more than 2 virtual network interface cards will fail.
Increase virtual memory to 1GB.
The driver provided with Solaris 10 5/08 does not work for the Infiniband HCA X4217A-Z. The Solaris IB Update 3 package is required.
Download the package from this web page:
http://www.sun.com/download/index.jsp?cat=Hardware%20Drivers&tab=3&subcat=InfiniBand
Follow the readme file to install the update package.
Solaris OS 10 11/06 might have problems running under VMware ESX if the virtual machine is allocated the default 512 MB. Reported problems include:
Before installing Solaris 11/06 OS as a guest, configure the virtual machine to use at least 1 GB of RAM.
Servers running Solaris OS 10 require the latest version of patch 123776. Data corruption resulting in disk errors may result if this patch is not installed.
Solaris AMD x64 support includes a boot-time check for the presence of a BIOS workaround for the AMD Opteron Erratum 131. If Solaris detects that the workaround for Erratum 131 is needed but it is not yet implemented, Solaris logs and displays the following warning message:
WARNING: BIOS microcode patch for AMD Athlon(tm) 64/Opteron(tm) processor erratum 131 was not detected; updating your system’s BIOS to a version containing this microcode patch is HIGHLY recommended or erroneous system operation may occur.
The BIOS implements the workaround required for Erratum 131, so this warning message can be safely ignored.
(Fixed in Solaris 10 5/08 OS.)
An attempt to boot Solaris OS can result in a hang or panic if all CPUs are not ready within 20 seconds. Error messages report that one or more CPUs failed to start.
Do not use verbose startup on systems with a large number of processors.
In Solaris OS version 10 11/06 or earlier, the maximum number of processor cores seen on x64 systems is 21. This is less than the number of cores available in a quad-core X4600 M2 system with 6 or 8 CPU modules. Such systems must run Solaris 10 08/07 or later.
The following are current issues.
For RHEL5 and SLES10, when the LSI RAID and the normal hard drive coexist, OS (MPT SAS driver) always recognize the normal hard drive ahead of the LSI RAID.
For example, when hard drives in slot0 and slot1 are used to create a RAID1, and a normal hard drive is in slot2, SLES10 and RHEL5 enumerate RAID1 as sdb, with the normal hard drive in slot2 as sda. However SLES9 and RHEL4 enumerate RAID1 as sda, with the normal harddrive in slot2 as sdb.
When using SIA to install RHEL 4.8 or 5.3, the SunInstallationAssistant.log file might not appear on the disk. Check for an SIA update to fix this issue.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP4 might not boot after installation on systems with quad-core processors.
A kernel with a fix for this problem (2.6.5-7.311 or later) can be downloaded from the Novell web site.
A change made in the system BIOS is Software 2.0 causes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4 to panic.
The BIOS included with Software 2.3 contains a workaround for this problem. After flashing new system firmware, disable the following options in the system BIOS:
Boot Error Message on RHEL 4U4 (6791882)
A change in Software 2.3 can cause boot error messages similar to the following to occur:
If this message appears while booting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4U4 on a system with 6 or 8 processors, it does not represent an actual error and can be safely ignored. It should not be ignored on other versions of RHEL or other hardware configurations.
Because of changes in the drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, ethernet port assignments may not start with the four built-in ports connected to the onboard network controller. If any ethernet PCI-E option cards are installed, ports on these option cards will probably get the first port numbers.
In RHEL 4. you can assume that the built-in ports will be assigned port number 0-3. That assumption may not be valid after an upgrade to RHEL 5.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3U9 does not support installation using a CD or DVD drive connect via a USB 2.0 interface.
Before installing the OS, change the BIOS settings to use USB 1.1.
Certain version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are not supported with full memory configurations on the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server. Using more memory than is supported for these RHEL versions causes memory errors. Supported memory configurations are:
RHEL 5U2 has passed tests with 512 GB and is supported in that configuration.
A problem with the lpfc driver can cause Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5U1 to hang when the Xen-enabled kernel is used. To fix this problem, update the lpfc driver to 8.2.0.1, or upgrade to RHEL 5U2.
The cpuspeed service may fail to lower the CPU frequency when the system is idle.
Restart the service when the system is idle:
SIA Installations of RHEL5.1 fails because of legacy “dmraid” information on supplied disks.
The legacy “dmraid” information is on the last 2000 disk sectors. The following shell command overwrites these sectors with zeros:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=$(blockdev --getss /dev/sda) count=2000 seek=$(expr $(blockdev --getsize /dev/sda) - 2000)
The Service Processor implements virtual floppy and DVD drives so that they each have their own logical unit number (LUN). This may prevent them from being detected on systems that only configure LUN 0 on each port.
Configure the system to scan all possible LUNs at boot time.
1. Add the following line to /etc/modules.conf:
options scsi_mod max_scsi_luns=n
Where n is the largest number of devices on any port.
3. Run mkinitrd to rebuild the boot-time RAM disks. On Red Hat systems:
mkinitrd -k vmlinuz-kernel -i initrd-kernel
mkinitrd -v initrd-kernel.img kernel
Where kernel is a kernel-level identifier, such as “2.4.21-292-smp”. You can identify the currently running kernel with this command:
You should also rebuild the RAM disks for any other kernel images in /boot that you might use.
The following error might appear when X Windows starts up on Red Hat Linux 4 U3:
mtrr: type mismatch for fd000000,800000 old: write-back new: write-combining
You can safely ignore this message. System functionality is not affected.
On servers running RHEL4 U3/U4 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 service pack 3 (SLES9 SP3), when USB1.1 only or USB 1.1 + USB2.0 is configured in the BIOS Setup Utility, the dmesg log shows the following error message if devices are plugged into any USB port on the server:
drivers/usb/input/hid-input.c: event field not found
This message can be safely ignored.
Use of USB 2.0 with RHEL4 U3 may lead to unexpected behavior. Only USB 1.1 is supported.
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Set the BIOS USB Controller Support option to USB 1.1 only:
1. Enter the BIOS Setup utility by pressing the F2 key while the system is booting up and performing the power-on self-test (POST).
2. On the BIOS Main Menu screen, select the Advanced tab to open the Advanced Menu screen.
3. On the Advanced Menu screen, choose USB Configuration.
4. On the USB Configuration screen, change USB Controller Support to USB1.1.
5. Press and release the right arrow key until the Exit menu screen is displayed.
6. Follow the instructions on the Exit menu screen to save your changes and exit the Setup utility.
Under heavy load, the RHEL4 message file and dmesg log file might show messages similar to the following:
Your time source seems to be unstable or some driver is hogging interrupts.
This message is caused by the contention between different IRQ handlers, but there is no negative impact to the system.
During the boot process of RHEL4 U3/U4, the following error message might be displayed:
hda: packet command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: packet command error: error=0x50
This error is a known problem with how the IDE driver handles the trayless CD/DVD-ROM drive that is contained in the server. This error is caused by the fact that the driver is attempting to close the CD/DVD-ROM drive tray. Because this drive does not have a tray, an error is reported.
None. It is safe to ignore this error.
On servers running RHEL4 U3/U4 or SLES9 SP3, when booting into the graphical user interface, the dmesg log might show the following error message more than once:
drivers/usb/input/hid-input.c: event field not found
During X initialization, some devices can get out of sync and some EV_REP events can get incorrectly interpreted as input events. This is caused by a bug in the HID driver. This message can be safely ignored.
When installing SLES9 SP3 using YaST, the hard disk preparation operation might return an error message that says:
Error: Could not set up swap partition /dev/sda1
Click on OK and finish the installation. You can then set up your desired swap partition using the commands below.
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You can set the swap partition manually as described in the following steps.
1. After SLES9 SP3 has finished installation and the server has booted, login as the root user.
2. Issue the following commands in a terminal window:
Where swap is the swap partition space.
3. In the /etc/fstab file, make an entry for swap partition (if it not already present), with option default. It should look like the following:
/dev/sdj5 swap swap defaults 0 0
During SLES9 SP3 boot up, the following message is displayed:
ACPI-0201: *** Error: Return object type is incorrect [SB_.LATA._CRS]
(Node 00000107fffdc180), AE_TYPE
System functionality is not affected. The message can be safely ignored.
During boot up, the SLES9 SP3 kernel prints multiple floppy drive assignment messages:
Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi generic sg2 at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0
Vendor: AMI Model: Virtual Floppy Rev: 1.00
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Each multiple message displays a different drive name. In the example shown above, the drive letter is sdb.
Use the drive name from the first message and ignore the subsequent messages.
During SLES9 SP3 system boot messages similar to this example are displayed:
IA-32 Microcode Update Driver: v1.13 <tigran@veritas.com>
microcode: CPU1 not a capable Intel processor
microcode: CPU0 not a capable Intel processor
You can safely ignore these messages.
If you choose to install SLES9 SP3 from a CD using the graphical mode, you receive a text message informing you that there is less than the required 96 MB of memory available for installation in this mode.
Switch to the text mode to install the product.
On SLES9 SP3 systems, when you enter the cdrecord-scanbus command, you receive the following warning message:
pg: module not supported by Novell, setting U taint flag.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 U4 (32-bit) supports PowerNow, but does not enable it by default.
To enable PowerNow, enter these commands:
To verify processor speed changes, use the following command:
# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq
Do not refer to /proc/cpuinfo; this file might give misleading results.
When a USB device is hot-plugged (connected while the system is live) to a system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, a warning message similar to the following might be written to the kernel ring buffer:
inserting floppy driver for 2.4.21-47.ELsmp
floppy0: no floppy controllers found
This occurs because hot-plugging a USB device causes the floppy module to be loaded by the kernel. When the module discovers that no floppy drives are available, it prints the warning message and exits.
This message can safely be ignored. To suppress the message, add the following line to /etc/modules.conf:
If the USB keyboard is connected to either the front or back USB ports, the system running RHEL 3 U5 (64-bit) always shows the following error message in the kernel ring buffer after a reboot.
initialize_kbd: Keyboard reset failed, no ACK
This message can be safely ignored.
On a system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 U8 (64-bit), a message similar to the following might appear in the kernel ring buffer:
PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt pin A of device 00:01.1
These messages are accompanied by numerous insmod failures. They might be caused by OS ACPI table creation errors related to an incompatibility between the BIOS and the OS. No fix is expected.
This message can be safely ignored.
Front Panel USB ports might be completely inoperative on systems running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (64 Bit) when USB 2.0 is enabled. This problem does not occur if a USB device is connected to the front panel at boot time or if USB 2.0 is disabled.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 might hang while recovering from an error in a SCSI bus or device when an LSI 22320 or LSI 20320 card is used. This problem is fixed in SUSE version 2.6.16.21-0.15 of the Linux kernel.
Drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 are not available for the following Sun option cards:
The following HBAs will not work correctly with the lpfc drivers included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP 3.
You must download and install updated drivers provided by Novell. These are currently available at the following URL:
http://forgeftp.novell.com/driver-process/pub/update/SUN/sle9/common/x86_64/update/SUSE-SLES/9/rpm/x86_64/emulex-lpfc-2.6.5_7.244_smp.x86_64.rpm
This issue applies to the following network cards:
No drivers are available for these cards on the following operating systems:
A system with 8 quad-core CPU modules might crash with Sync Flood errors while installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 as a Xen guest operating system. The problem was not observed on systems with 4 quad-core CPU modules.
Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. If more than 200GB of RAM is installed, specify mem=200g as a parameter in the kernel command in /boot/grub/menu.lst.
The supplied RAID drivers do not install correctly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 U4.
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1. Install mptlinux-3.02.83.01-1.rhel4.x86_64.rpm.
2. Edit /etc/modprobe.conf, replacing the line:
3. Regenerate the initrd boot image with the following commands:
As of Software 1.2, MegaRAID Storage Manager (MSM) is not supported with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 64-bit.
On a system running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, error messages are printed when the LSI SNMP agent is stopped. These messages indicate a shared memory error. No actual problems have been reported in connection with these messages.
If a RAID 1 slot 1 disk is pulled from a system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, many errors appear in the buffer, and the file system containing the OS becomes read-only.
When Red Hat Enterprise Linux is upgraded to RHEL4U4 (mptlinux driver version 3.02.83.01-1) the mptscsi.ko driver is no longer needed, but is not removed. As a result, a number of messages that begin “mptscsi: Unknown symbol” and “mptscsi: disagrees about version of symbol” are written to the kernel ring buffer.
These messages can be safely ignored.
If you install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 U3 with LVM hard-drive partitioning, then attempt to use the LSI SAS Utility to set up RAID on your hard drives, the following message is displayed:
Do not install RHEL4 U3 with LVM partitioning if you plan on using RAID with your hard drives.
The system reboots after the memory count during POST when an Emulex LPe11002 host bus adapter (HBA) is installed in any of the PCIe slots.
1. For devices implementing Advanced Error Reporting, set the “Unsupported Request Error Mask” bit in the “Uncorrectable Error Mask” register.
2. Do not set the legacy “SERR Enable” bit, and instead use the PCI-Express specific bits in the “Device Control Register” to control PCIE error reporting. Set the “Non-Fatal” and “Fatal Error Reporting Enable” bits, but not the “Unsupported Request Reporting Enable” bit.
3. Do not treat ERR_NONFATAL messages as a fatal system error (use ERR_FATAL for fatal errors).
The following are current issues.
The default login and password are root and solaris.
SunVTS 6.2 Graphical User Interface (GUI), shipped on the Bootable Diagnostics CD, Version 2.1f, has a Meter button. This Meter button does not work because it requires the Solaris stdperformeter utility, which is not available for bootable diagnostics.
If MSM is running under Windows 2003 or Windows 2008, the following sequences of actions can cause MSM to hang.
2. Clear the configuration file.
When the hang occurs, you must use Task Manager to kill MSM, then reboot the system.
Replace the disk before loading a configuration file.
In non-RAID configurations, MSM-IR does not update its status log when a disk is removed. Refreshing with F5 does not help. The log is updated when the disk is re-inserted.
The synchronization progress reported by the cfggen status command is not accurate. This was first observed in DOS version 2.00.18 of cfggen.
The MSM client is not able to find servers that are not on the same IP subnet as the client.
Set the server IP address manually.
The MSM utilities might show incorrect disk drive counts after a drive is inserted or removed. This only occurs in non-RAID configurations.
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On Windows you can work around this defect by restarting the MSM utilities.
1. Close the MSM-IR application.
2. Using the Windows Service Manager, restart MRMonitor and MSMFramework
3. Reopen the MSM-IR application.
The following are current issues.
Intel Team Suite Can’t Be Installed on Windows 2008 SP2 and Windows 2008 R2 Platforms (6907769)
On-Board Network Ports Cannot Be Used to Initiate Teaming in Windows Server 2008 R2 (6868558)
Copying Large File To or From USB Device Can Cause Reboot (6707305)
Continuous Reboots with Sun StorageTek SAS RAID HBA External (6774215)
Patch May Be Required To See All Cores (6685074)
Preinstalled Windows Server 2003 R2
Windows Utility mkfloppy.exe Does Not Select Correct Floppy Drive If More Than One Floppy Drive Is Present
The Intel 82546 Dual-port GB Ethernet Controllers are connected through PCI-X bus. The new Intel Team suite is not compatible with Windows 2008 SP2 and Windows 2008 R2 platforms. The Intel Team suite can be installed successfully on Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 SP1.
Intel network interface card (NIC) teaming is not supported with PCI-X network interface cards running on Windows Server 2008 R2. Your server’s on-board network ports are on the PCI-X bus and therefore cannot be used to create an Intel NIC team with Windows Server 2008 R2. Your Windows installation uses a generic NIC driver that does not include the teaming feature.
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If you want to include the on-board network ports as part of an Intel NIC team, do the following:
1. Install an optional Intel 82571-based (or newer) PCIe network interface card (NIC) supported for Windows Server 2008 R2.
This driver provides Intel’s Advanced Networking Services. This driver is either included with your card, available from the card manufacturer’s web site or from Intel:
Include the on-board network ports as part of a multi-vendor team initiated from the Intel PCIe network card.
Copying a large file (more than 6 GB) between an internal disk and a USB device can cause the system to reboot. This has been seen on Windows 2003 R2 SP2, 64-bit.
BIOS 126, which is included in Software Release 2.3, contains a workaround for this problem. Because the workaround impairs I/O performance, it is not enabled by default.
To use this workaround, install Software Release 2.3 firmware as described in the software release notes. To enable the workaround, set the BIOS option “Chipset/SouthBridge Configuration/Force MMIO write non-Posted” to “Enabled.”
System with a Sun StorageTek SAS RAID HBA External (SG-XPCIESAS-R-EXT-Z), Windows 2008 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) might reboot continuously. This is caused by the option card picking up the wrong IRQ number, resulting in PCI errors and a HyperTransport sync flood.
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Put the option card in a slot other than 2. If this is not practical, follow these steps:
1. Download the latest driver from this web page: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=2870
2. Temporarily remove Sun StorageTek SAS RAID HBA External, from slot 2.
2. Power the system down and insert the option card into slot 2.
4. Install the driver you downloaded.
Windows 2003 Server SP1 may be unable to see all cores on dual-core or quad-core systems. Microsoft provides a patch to correct this problem. You can also correct this problem by upgrading to Windows 2003 Server SP2.
For more information, refer to Microsoft Knowledge Base articles 899656 and 914962. These are currently available from the following URLs:
The Windows Server 2003 R2 operating system might be preinstalled on your system. For more information, see Windows Server 2003 R2 Operating System in Introduction.
The mkfloppy.exe utility that is included in FloppyPack.zip can be run on any Windows system; it is used to create the Mass Storage Driver floppy that is used during Windows Server 2003 installation.
However, if there is more than one floppy drive present in the system (including USB-attached floppy drives), mkfloppy.exe does not select the correct floppy drive.
Ensure that the system has only one floppy drive present when using mkfloppy.exe.
Due to a BIOS error, InstallPack fails to install the packages required by the Windows 2008 OS.
| Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server Product Notes | 819-5032-24 |
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