PANIC: early exception rip ffffffff80208afd error 0 cr2 0
Symptom
Linux hang at boot with the following error messages:
PANIC: early exception rip ffffffff80208afd error 0 cr2 0 PANIC: early exception rip ffffffff8011af4c error 0 cr2 0 ffffffffff5fd023 ... Decompressing Linux...done Booting the kernel.
Affected Platforms
Omega 1820 and other dual Opteron models
Affected Kernels
ASL 2.6.12-X and others
Solution
NUMA is enabled automatically in the ASL 2.6.12-x kernel and others such as RHEL4 2.6.9-22.EL. For the platform, NUMA requires both CPU memory banks to be populated. When only one CPU memory bank is populated, the NUMA-enabled kernel will panic during boot.
To fix the problem, disable NUMA by passing the kernel parameter 'numa=off' to the GRUB boot loader. The optimal solution is to populate both CPU memory banks. That provides the best system and memory performance.