Re: x2apic boot failure on recent sandy bridge system

From: Suresh Siddha
Date: Mon Dec 12 2011 - 02:24:04 EST


On Sun, 2011-12-11 at 13:43 -0800, Yinghai Lu wrote:
> -v4: according to Ingo, for x2apic pre-enabled system, if intr-remap can not
> be enabled, try to disable x2apic instead of panic and request to
> specify nox2apic for next boot.

If bios has not exported any DMAR tables but enabled x2apic pre-boot, it
is tricky for the OS to disable x2apic and continue with xapic for
number of reasons. For example, if chipset has already enabled
interrupt-remapping (which is typically recommended to be enabled before
x2apic) but didn't provide DMAR tables, then there is no way OS can
disable interrupt-remapping in this case.

So even though the cpu might be back in xapic mode, but external
interrupts won't work.

thanks,
suresh

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