Proxmox Boot Hangs at "Booting Kernel" when full 20Gb of RAM/memory used

  • Thread starter Thread starter Acorp
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Acorp

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Hello All,

I have just installed Proxmox VE 1.6 on a new machine. It is two Quad-Core AMD Barcelona's in an Asus KFN5D-SLI with 20GB of ECC DDR2.

I had a heck of a time getting it to install - finally I found a Debian hint about limiting ram with the "mem=512M" boot parameter, and I was able to install ProxMox. The installation was performed with a standard ProxMox VE 1.6 ISO/CD-ROM media download utilizing:

debug mem=512M

The install completed successfully, but now it won't boot unless I (after much trial and error) limit it to 8GB of RAM by specifying a boot parameter of mem=8192M on the initial grub boot line.

If I don't limit it (or specify >8GB of memory on the boot parameter), the system simply hangs with no error at "Booting Kernel."

Prior to the ProxMox installation, this server was running happily with CentOS 5.5 and Xen (seeing and utilizing all 20GB of RAM).

I know this is not a ProxMox limitation, because I have another server (different motherboard) happily running ProxMox with 32GB of RAM. I did (if this is at all relevant) install ProxMox VE 1.5 on it a long time ago, then just recently did the upgrade to 1.6.

Any ideas what I need to do to allow ProxMox to boot and utilize the full 20GB of RAM on this new server?

TIA!

- Acorp

www.acorp.net
 
I was hoping you had hit on something, but when I checked it is running the latest BIOS available for this motherboard.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

- Acorp

www.acorp.net
 
Out of interest, does the new server work with proxmox 1.5 or an earlier version? perhaps you could install that and upgrade...
Also proxmox supports several kernels, could you try different kernel versions and see if any of them work correctly?
 
Acorp said:
I was hoping you had hit on something, but when I checked it is running the latest BIOS available for this motherboard.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

- Acorp

www.acorp.net
Click to expand...
Hi,
why do you have 20GB? Do you mix Ram-sizes in one Memory-Channel? Or on one CPU?
Perhaps this would be a problem.
Normaly i would understand 16GB (8*2GB or 4*4GB) and 32GB (8*4GB).

Can you try with the same DIMMs in all slots?

I run Proxmox on a bladesystem (two AMD-Dualcore) with 24GB Ram without trouble some month ago.

Udo
 
Hi Udo,

The 20GB is what I had when I built the server. It is 4GB x 2 and 2GB x 6. The Asus KFN5D is a dual CPU socket motherboard. According to the manual, memory does not need to be balanced between the CPU's, as long as the amount of memory in each bank is equal. So, for CPU1 A1+B1=A2+B2, and for CPU2 C1+D1=C2+D2.

Each bank of CPU1 has 4GB for a total of 8GB, and each bank of CPU2 has 6GB for a total of 12GB, giving a total of 20GB for the machine and both CPU's.

That said, however, the maximum amount ProxMox will let me use is 8GB, which is exactly the amount of memory I have in CPU1 sockets even though /proc/meminfo shows 20GB...interesting. Even more interesting, is that only CPU1 is showing up under ProxMox, though both CPU's show up on POST...and CPU1 has exactly 8GB of memory!

I may try reconfiguring the memory and see what happens...if I move the 12GB to CPU1 will I be able to use 12GB?!

I'll report back...but the mystery gets deeper: Anybody have any ideas why ProxMox only sees one of my CPU's?!

- Acorp
www.acorp.net
 
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