Support Notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3 for the Itanium Processor on HP Integrity Servers

Support Note for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3 for the Itanium® Processor on HP Integrity Servers
Issues and Known Problems
Chapter 1 13
The normal behavior on rx7620 and rx8620 servers is for an nPartition to be made
inactive (all cells are in a boot-is-blocked state) when shutdown -h or poweroff is issued
from the Red Hat Linux command line. This behavior is established with the “acpiconfig
disable powerdown” setting, which is the normal setting for the single-pci-domain ACPI
configuration.
On HP Integrity Superdome servers, an nPartition is always made inactive when halted
from the operating system (for example, after shutdown -h), and this behavior cannot be
changed.
When softpowerdown is enabled on an rx7620 or rx8620 server, if one nPartition is
defined in the server then halting the operating system powers off the server cabinet
(including all cells and I/O chassis). On an rx7620 or rx8620 server with multiple
nPartitions, halting the operating system from an nPartition with softpowerdown
enabled causes only the resources on the local nPartition to be powered off.
You can run the acpiconfig command with no arguments to check the current setting
and the softpowerdown setting; however, softpowerdown information is displayed only
when different from normal behavior.
To power on hardware that has been powered off, use the PE command at the management
processor command menu. To make an inactive nPartition active, use the management
processor BO command to boot the nPartition past the boot-is-blocked state.
12. If you have more than two network interfaces, Red Hat’s KickStart scripts function only in
the first two (i.e., eth0, eth1).
13. The default configuration for Cell Local Memory (CLM) on an nPartition is one percent or
less, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v. 3 Update 3 does not support more than this
default on nPartition-capable Integrity servers (i.e., rx7620, rx8620, and Integrity
Superdome servers). Among other problems, exceeding one percent CLM can cause
lengthy delays in booting the system and erratic performance of some applications
because of memory hotspots.
An nPartition running HP-UX or Windows may be configured with much higher
percentages of CLM. If booting Linux on an nPartition previously configured for either of
these operating systems, run the info mem command from the efi shell to verify that CLM
is less than one percent.
NOTE The commands below assume the partition has been reset for
reconfiguration using the MP:CM>rr command in the management
processor.