..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Upon booting FC5 I get the following message:

..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC

What does this mean ? ... I've googled it, but I still don't know what it means. As far as I know everything works fine on FC5, but this message bothers me ... it wasn't there on FC4.

This is on my notebook
2.8 Ghz Pentium 4
1 GB RAM
GeForce 4 420 Go
SiS chipset

[Richard Harris]

I just installed FC5 on an AMD 2200 and got the same error. You find out anything yet?

[H_TeXMeX_H]

I submitted a bug report some time ago:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=187411

[H_TeXMeX_H]

This bug is definitely caused by the BIOS ... updating it may or may not help depending on what the manufacturers decide to update.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

I got a question:

Well, I've been looking at the kernel sources recently tring to see what goes wrong. It looks like the error is generated within a function in linux-2.6.1.x/arch/i386/kernel/io_apic.c called check_timer. The error only gets printed if pin1 is anything but -1 and the function timer_irq_works returns zero indicating that the timer IRQs are "defunct". There is a comment about this function (timer_irq_works):

There is a nasty bug in some older SMP boards, their mptable lies
about the timer IRQ. We do the following to work around the situation:

- timer IRQ defaults to IO-APIC IRQ
- if this function detects that timer IRQs are defunct, then we fall
back to ISA timer IRQs

I think this shouldn't happen because I don't have an older SMP board ... any ideas ?

[davidnix71]

Here are three links that explain the problem.

http://www.wlug.org.nz/APIC

http://developer.osdl.org/dev/robustmutexes/src/fusyn.hg/Documentation/i386/IO-APIC.txt

http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-8.0/docs/linux-2.2.19/IO-APIC.txt

The last link has a script workaround.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Unfortunately, this is a laptop and I have no clue which PCI slots are where.

But as the first article you said states ... I don't really need ioapic or apic cuz it's not smp so I can just use the noapic noioapic boot flags for now.

[mass]

did you solved the problem now, if you did, how?
i did not completely understand those links at least they did not help much...
what about windows, i can not boot that too, machine restarts itself over and over and everytime it says "Pri Master Hard Disk:S.M.A.R.T. Command Failed"...

[Calum]

what about windows? try the windowsbbs.com for help using that particular beast.