Bug 715980

Summary: yast cannot be used with 11.4 and kernel-xen on sandy bridge (i5/i7)
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.4 Reporter: Roman Haag <novell>
Component: BasesystemAssignee: E-mail List <bnc-team-screening>
Status: VERIFIED NORESPONSE QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Critical    
Priority: P5 - None CC: help, jonathanjstevens, joser.condado.ext, karl, myself, suse
Version: Factory   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86-64   
OS: openSUSE 11.4   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Community User Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Roman Haag 2011-09-05 13:11:03 UTC
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:6.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.1

sometimes there is a kernel panic on boot also.
but the main thing is, that yast cannot be used on a new i5 platform together with kernel-xen and an openSuSe 11.4.

it quits with
"sbin/yast: line 423: 6609 Illegal instruction $ybindir/y2base $module "$@" "$SELECTED_GUI" $Y2_GEOMETRY $Y2UI_ARGS"

/var/log/messages contains:
"kernel: [11144.225096] packagekitd[6531] trap invalid opcode ip:7f02cfe8f7a0 sp:7f02c68d2ee8 error:0 in ld-2.11.3.so[7f02cfe7c000+1e000]"

see also:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/455995-yast2-not-working-clean-minimal-server-config-xen.html
http://forums.opensuse.org/forums/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/462697-opensuse-11-4-xen.html
http://forums.opensuse.org/forums/deutsch-german/hilfe-und-helfen/installation-administration/458106-yast-mit-xen-funktioniert-nicht-opensuse-11-4-a.html

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. start a opensuse 11.4 with a xen kernel
2. open /sbin/yast

Actual Results:  
not startable. xen doesn't work either
Comment 1 André Jagusch 2011-09-19 16:44:04 UTC
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. start a opensuse 11.4 with a xen kernel
> 2. open /sbin/yast
> 
> Actual Results:  
> not startable. xen doesn't work either

Hi,

I can reproduce the error message and behaviour with regards to yast. It is possible however to use xen domUs on my machine after executing:

chkconfig xencommons off

and rebooting the machine.

Best Regards,

Andre
Comment 2 Jonthan Stevens 2011-09-22 08:56:56 UTC
I have just replaced the motherboard/processor in my OpenSuse 11.4 XEN system, and have exactly the same problem with the majority of Yast2 components.

The new processor is a Sandy Bridge (model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10GHz), the MB chip-set is a P67 (stepping B3).

I have no problems with XEN (OK, so first boot I forgot to enable the virtualisation options in the BIOS - but let's not talk about that... ) - all my XEN VMs appear to be running happily.

This appear to be (from the googling I have done) an issue specific to the processor with xen.
Comment 3 Karl Scowen 2011-10-18 21:04:13 UTC
I've found the same with a SUSE Studio build I did. YaST gives me the error 
sbin/yast2: line 423:  5057 Illegal instruction    $ybindir/y2base $module "$@" "$SELECTED_GUI" $Y2_GEOMETRY $Y2UI_ARGS

The same message is given whether VT_x is enabled or disabled in the BIOS. Sometimes YaST won't even start, other times it only occurs when loading a YaST module. But it always occurs before I can do anything with YaST.

I don't know if Xen virtualisation works or not as I haven't tried. 

I've found that the build works fine in VirtualBox.

Firefox doesn't work when running on hardware, but works fine in VirtualBox once again – which may or may not be related.

My hardware is a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K CPU in a Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3R-B3 motherboard with 4 GB RAM.
Comment 4 Karl Scowen 2011-10-24 05:20:45 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> I've found the same with a SUSE Studio build I did. YaST gives me the error 
> sbin/yast2: line 423:  5057 Illegal instruction    $ybindir/y2base $module "$@"
> "$SELECTED_GUI" $Y2_GEOMETRY $Y2UI_ARGS
> 
> The same message is given whether VT_x is enabled or disabled in the BIOS.
> Sometimes YaST won't even start, other times it only occurs when loading a YaST
> module. But it always occurs before I can do anything with YaST.
> 
> I don't know if Xen virtualisation works or not as I haven't tried. 
> 
> I've found that the build works fine in VirtualBox.
> 
> Firefox doesn't work when running on hardware, but works fine in VirtualBox
> once again – which may or may not be related.
> 
> My hardware is a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K CPU in a Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3R-B3
> motherboard with 4 GB RAM.

I can confirm that the same build works fine on a Pentium 4 541 in a Asus P5K SE motherboard, and also works fine with the normal kernel (I installed it using the P4, then booted it with the i5, and it worked fine (used the normal kernel by default)).
Comment 5 Raymond Obin 2011-11-30 11:05:28 UTC
If anyone needs a work-around, I have just switched from xen to kvm on OpenSuSE 11.4.
KVM appears to be working fine with my Windows 2011 SBS and SuSE11.4 VMs.
Comment 6 Jan Beulich 2012-03-26 09:09:32 UTC
I don't think you ever specified which exact hypervisor and kernel versions you're using. Please update to the most recent maintenance updates and re-check. If the problem persists, try

- adding "noxsaveopt" to the kernel (not Xen) command line
- adding "noxsave" to the kernel (not Xen) command line
- 12.1 hypervisor
- 12.1 kernel
Comment 7 Richard Sawkins 2012-05-02 06:50:11 UTC
I'm using the following :

kernel-xen-2.6.37.6-0.11.1.x86_64
kernel-desktop-2.6.37.6-0.11.1.x86_64
xen-libs-4.0.3_01-0.2.1.x86_64

When running the xen kernel yast crashes, works fine with the desktop kernel.
Comment 8 Jan Beulich 2012-05-02 07:38:10 UTC
Mind providing the technical details of the crash then? Otherwise I don't see why you added the above comment...
Comment 9 Richard Sawkins 2012-05-03 04:40:21 UTC
The crash is the same as listed above, from the command line as root, "yast"

sbin/yast: line 423:  4678 Illegal instruction     $ybindir/y2base $module "$@" "$SELECTED_GUI" $Y2_GEOMETRY $Y2UI_ARGS
Comment 10 Jan Beulich 2012-05-03 09:30:01 UTC
Please see #6 for what to do next.
Comment 11 Richard Sawkins 2012-05-11 02:52:27 UTC
- adding "noxsaveopt" to the kernel (not Xen) command line
- adding "noxsave" to the kernel (not Xen) command line

Neither of these made a difference, still get the same crash listed above when running yast.
Comment 12 Jan Beulich 2012-05-11 07:14:14 UTC
If this is without the hypervisor being forced to enable xsave, and without it defaulting to do so (which could be overridden with "xsave=0" on its command line), then this is likely the meanwhile well known glibc issue of not looking at CPUID.OSXSAVE when determining whether AVX or FMA can be used.
Comment 13 Kun Kun Zhang 2012-06-18 13:33:51 UTC
Long time no response, so closed. Feel free to reopen it.