FYI: Potential hang/lockup when installing

X

xrobau

Member
Sep 4, 2022
33
13
13
QLD, Australia
clearlyip.com
TL;DR: If your machine is hanging on install, disable VT-d in the BIOS

As I'm trialing Proxmox, I'm installing it on three machines. One (luckily for me, the first) installed without a problem, I managed to get it all set up, and it worked fine. I then decomissioned two older vmware machines and tried to install proxmox on them. Both of them hung on install, and at slightly different times, and it *hard hung* - the mouse in the installer GUI wouldn't move or anything!

Both were up to date with all firmware settings, etc, the normal things.

After trying a couple of times, I switched to the text console after starting the install, and saw a bunch of errors like

DMAR: ERROR: DMA PTE for vPFN xxxxxx already set (to yyyyyy not yyyyyy)

This lead me to a (as yet unmerged) kernel patch documented on launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1970453

I confirmed that I was able to repeatedly replicate it by simply cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda, and then turned off VT-d in the bios. Instant fix!

So if people are having strange issues where their machines are hard-freezing, give it a shot!
 
If I remember correctly, IOMMU was enabled by default for Intel in the kernel version of the installer. Later, this was reverted because it caused problems on older machines. Adding intel_iommu=off to the kernel parameters will also help, but disabling IOMMU (VT-d) in BIOS is indeed a work-around. I expect this to be fixed for the next installer (as it is fixed for newer kernel versions).
 
xrobau said:
Bump, this is still broken in the current installer, more than a month later.
Click to expand...
Bump, this is still broken in the current installer 7.3.3
Well, i can boot and the HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen 8 works but there are still:

dmar error dma pte for vPFN already set bla bla bla..........
 
Last edited:
disable VT-d
Zippi said:
Bump, this is still broken in the current installer 7.3.3
Well, i can boot and the HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen 8 works but there are still:

dmar error dma pte for vPFN already set bla bla bla..........
Click to expand...
disable VT-d
 
This is still a problem. Hopefully one day the installer will account for this and disabling VT-d won't be needed.
 
I also just ran into this issue with a HP Microserver Gen 8 and LSI SAS2008 HBA running Proxmox 8.3.1 and kernel PMX 6.8.12-4. Disabling VT-d in BIOS seems to have worked around it. The first symptom was the sudden appearance of CKSUM errors on all drives in a ZFS pool, including data corruption found during a scrub. Upon connecting a monitor, I found numerous errors on screen, all similar to:
Code: 
DMAR: ERROR: DMA PTE for vPFN 0xf1f7f already set (to f1f7f003 not 1c1043001)
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom