In summary, after updating from 11.2 through 11.3 to 11.4, normal boot works fine, failsafe mode hangs with two fatal errors - “Module atiixp not found” and “Module ide-pci-generic not found”. i would like to fix this a) so I have a recovery position b) so I learn a little more.
If you would be kind enough to help please read on:
As 11.2 has gone out of support I decided to embark on the upgrades to 11.3 then 11.4 using the zypper method described on this site. I think failsafe boot worked ok with the original 11.2 install, but I never had to use it in anger, so I can’t be 100% sure. I did not test failsafe in 11.3, just checked that the typical cd set of applications seemed ok before proceeding with the upgrade to 11.4.
I have an AMD processor, chip set and an ATI 3800 series graphics card, so I added the ATI repositories for 11.3 and 11.4 as i worked through the upgrades. At 11.4 there were some graphics glitches during normal and failsafe boot which were successfully fixed by adding “nomodeset” to both boot options.
Normal boot works fine but failsafe boot hangs with the error messages above. Searching for failsafe boot errors is unhelpful since, in all cases I have checked, normal boot fails too. I did try removing “Xfailsafe” from the failsafe options which produced no change.
I am guessing that, in failsafe mode, the ATI drivers are not loaded into the kernel and the idea is to default to some safer drivers which, in my case, are not present for some reason. However, there seems to be little information on the origin or purposes of atiixp so I don’t know how to go about fixing this.
I have not really researched the generic pci driver issue, but I am guessing that this is a fall back when the expected atiixp is missing.
Did you by any chance install 11.2 from a Live CD/DVD rather than Net or Full DVD install?
I’m thinking some of the modules in your /etc/sysconfig/kernel list, may be erroneously dropped when building a No KMS version, or somethings wrong with the replacements.
Honestly I never needed a “Failsafe” kernel, once I got distro booting normally, what I have used is my own fallbak “golden” kernel, a habit from days when “Online Kernel updates” were quite dicey affairs, once I had to use Fedora Live CD to reinstall rpm’s, as the update left me without a module loader and removed the basic ldd system to!
A search on atiixp reveals ac97 soundcard/southbridge drivers if it’s any help
Might be pointless mentioning this but a lightweight live distro I fooled with in the past had in it’s ‘Boot in Safe Mode’ entry nosound as one of it’s grub boot parameters, no idea whether it works for all distros as I’ve not seen it on any other linux grub entries that I can recall and my old mate Google didn’t have much to say about it
As I say, no idea whether Opensuse will even accept nosound as a parameter (the guy who made the distro did compile his own kernel so maybe not), but I doubt it would do any harm to try it
Incidentally it wouldn’t hurt to make a restore of the system as it is if this is the only problem, it does boot normally right? And you can always make another restore if/when you fix the failsafe thing, tbh I’m a bit like rob and can’t say as I’ve ever used the Failsafe boot option, most of my systems being multiboot the menu can get a bit cluttered so I even usually comment out all the Failsafe entries in the menu.lst file
From my searching I agree that atiixp has a sound element and is related to the south bridge so I will try the nosound option and report back. However, I suspect there is a load of other functionality - like the whole pci bus? - which doesn’t get a driver.
Yes, system does boot fine in normal mode and I too hope not to have to need failsafe! However, I would like to understand what is going on.
I am not sure if I used a Live CD install or not anymore as it was quite a long time ago; I will try to check.
Look at the parameters for the fail safe boot. Try them by typing them at the boot screen for the normal boot option. Boot and see if that breaks things. If you find one that does you can then remove it from the menu.lst failsafe option line. Note it may be that it is more then one option that is causing the problem. If so the process would be much more complicated.
Thanks Gogalthorp. Very fair suggestion which I will have to get to.
Meanwhile, have just found the best description yet of the functions beside sound linked to atiixp here: Linux Kernel Driver Database: CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ATIIXP: ATI IXP chipset IDE support
"This driver adds explicit support for ATI IXP chipset. This allows the kernel to change PIO, DMA and UDMA speeds and to configure the chip to optimum performance.
Why would you need failsafe boot params?? You just have found certain boot paramter combos don’t function, on your system; wich you have upgraded multiple times.
Just manually delete one option at a time, if you must know which one is not liked and boot, if none of them work remove 2 combos of options.
To have multiple kernels, as a yet safer alternative is to enable multiversion in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf :
The drawback is after a kernel upgrade you have to manually delete old unwanted kernel versions. You could perhaps protect a known good kernel in Soffware manager against deletion. In past, I would simply “rpm -i kernel-<type>” of one that worked as a fall back and allow updates to do their stuff on the most current version. It’s possible to install a kernel with rpm & avoid it beiing recorded in the rpm database, so that’s a way of avoiding having zypper touch it, and like making a manual backup of all the kernel files, which you keep around yourself.
Now the problem is probably because the module is called atixp with ati modules genarally being graphics driver with KMS support. Submit a bug report, preferably if possible after reproducing the problem in a spare partition, with a clean install of 11.4. Hope that is clear this time; I think the module for chipset is required but is disabled erroneiously!!
Working through the failsafe options showed no single element that would allow boot, but that boot could be achieved by deleting both “nosmp” and “maxcpus=0”.
Searching suggests that the common element is that both these options disable APIC so my provisional conclusion is that APIC is compulsory for my system.
Interestingly, atiixp and ide-pci-generic both still fail fatally, but that does not seem to be the problem.
I think I will call this one solved and say thank you all again.
Really??? It did not use to be the case, APICs were actually used to on the common (until recent years) single processor systems. A failsafe option was however explicit noapic and it wasn’t uncommon for APICs to be somewhat broken (have had boxes which need them off). Perhaps you can post a link to the sources you found?
Could you test that theory, by adding “noapic” to your working boot line when you get GRUB menu?
ACPI power management was also one option that was (traditionally) frequently broken, but with time has become more and more necessary, as requirement to support APM on new hardware goes. Now that was needed for powermanagement on multi-CPU systems, but not single CPU, folk would often confuse APIC and ACPI.