2007 / 06 / 21

GA-M57SLI-S4 hangs on boot

The Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 is one of the first motherboard to support LinuxBIOS. With the default Phoenix Award BIOS version V6.00PG, it hangs (panics) when booting Linux with the following errors:


Kernel panic - not syncing: IO-APIC + timer doesn't work!
Boot with apic=debug and send a report. Then try booting with the noapic option

You can solve this problem by appending acpi_use_timer_override to the kernel.

boot up from the command line

Simply append "acpi_use_timer_override" to the kernel name:


boot:
boot: linux acpi_use_timer_override

Lilo

Add the line append="acpi_use_timer_override" in lilo.conf:


image=/vmlinuz
  label=Linux
  append="acpi_use_timer_override"

GRUB

In grub.conf add acpi_use_timer_override to the kernel command:


title Linux
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 acpi_use_timer_override

RedHat kickstart

Use the --append option of the bootloader command (see the RedHat kickstart documentation):


bootloader --location=mbr --append="acpi_use_timer_override"

update

2008 / 04 / 08

LinuxBIOS has been renamed "coreboot" in January 2008. They host information on how to build coreboot for the GA-M57SLI-S4.
There are rumours on the net of people solving this issue by flashing the card with a new BIOS, but I have not found any good reference about it. I was also not able to determine which version of the card this applies to. The coreboot documentation gives some information on how to distinguish the different versions of the card.