I've been keeping a sneeky eye on the SL6 website to see if/when the Redhat MRG distributions head over. They arrived a couple of months back, so I sent to work patching one of our systems to realtime using the RPM's in http://glitesoft.cern.ch/cern/mrg/slc6X/
I've reset yum to point to this repository, and installed: kernel-rt kernel-rt-devel mrg-release - running auto-updates as needed to keep things fresh. As a baseline, I have to say it's worked VERY well indeed. We've currently got three systems patched to realtime with very little effort. The performance latency gains are significant with the RT kernel, but unlike other realtime O/S, we can still use standard commercial hardware drivers without modification. Win-win situation! *However*, all is not perfect. For the majority of the time, everything is rosy - we've got three big dual-Xeon machines all merrily running 24hours/day. Then, one day, a reboot of the machine brought the system back up with a kernel panic (not syncing: Attempted to kill init!). Just a one-off, I thought, we dropped back to the non-RT GRUB conf and everying is fine. About 2 weeks later, the second machine did the same - this time taking both RT and non-RT versions down (resulting in a full rebuild). The third machine is actually a brand-new rebuild - only had SL61 on it for 4 hours, and upon the first reboot after patching RT, it's just kernel panic'd as well (but the non-RT kernel is fine). All machines are Dell Precisions of different flavours, both with Intel 7400 and 7500 series chipsets and all with different generations of Intel Xeon processors. All three are panicing over the same error: "dracut" throwing errors and warnings, mainly about not finding the swap volumes. I will print some proper error messages later, if anyones interested, but at the moment it's friday afternoon, packing up time, and I've got a beer waiting for me. Would be interested in anyone shedding light of exactly what "dracut" is, not one I've ever come across before. Of course, if anyones got any ideas what might be going on, all comments greatly received! Have a good weekend all, Mat Mathew Maher Simulation Team Leader Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this e-mail and destroy any copies. Any dissemination or use of this information by a person other than the intended recipient is unauthorized and may be illegal.
