Kernel panic running in VMware on AMD (with 3.8.4)

[legsak1mbo]

I'm trying to run Tinycore in my ESXi environment which is made up of Dell R815 servers. It boots fine on my workstation in Fusion and on my friend's Intel ESXi cluster (R710s) but kernel panics for me. As soon as I enter a boot option a Call Trace appears and the machine fails to boot. I screen recorded the process and ran it with the debug boot option. The final entry before the panic is "Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...".

This is using the latest iso 3.8.4 (although it also happens with earlier versions). Since it works fine in Fusion and on the 710s I guess it must be an issue with the Athlons in my cluster. Does anybody have Tinycore running in VMware on AMD servers?

[maro]

Unfortunately I can't answer your specific question as I neither use ESXi nor own a (recent) AMD CPU.

But I wonder whether you have ruled out a corruption of the ISO image (by checking the MD5 checksum). Likewise I wonder whether you have tried to use an older or the most recent one to see if the issue persists across different kernel version.

[legsak1mbo]

Hi Maro,

Thanks for this - using the RC for TC and MC 4 works perfectly. I'm not sure about older versions but it certainly has the same issues with previous 3.x versions.

I'd be interested to know what's changed to get it working.

Thanks again.

[maro]

Well, for starters the kernels are different between TC 3.x (i.e. v2.6.33.3) and TC 4.x (i.e. v3.0.3). There are more differences, but given the reported last message me thinks that none of the other changes would had a chance to have much of an impact.

[gutmensch]

@legsak1mbo:
We're using a lot of Dell M905 at my work and there are still problems concerning outdated / wrong firmwares for the mainboards, RAM controllers, fc switches and board interconnects as well... Dell told us to update the whole infrastructure (even the interconnects), which would take down everything for at least some hours (if not days if something goes wrong :-/). The Opterons seem to have problems in some cases (e.g. when they trying to use VT functions), with Citrix XenServer and MS HyperV they're running well so far. I'd suggest to contact Dell support and first upgrade and check everything thoroughly before doing something in production