Bugzilla – Bug 152351
PnPBIOS error message when running dmesg in SLES 9 SP3 RC4 32bit
Last modified: 2008-04-28 15:18:24 UTC
We found error messages in dmesg with SLES 9 SP3 RC4 32bit. PnPBIOS: Warning! Your PnPBIOS caused a fatal error. Attempting to continue PnPBIOS: You may need to reboot with the "nobiospnp" option to operate stably PnPBIOS: Check with your vendor for an updated BIOS But we don't see this error message in SLES 9 SP3 RC4 64bit.
Please attach the output from hwinfo. Does 32bit boot and work properly beside this message ?
Our system is nvidia CK8-04 Pro + nvidia IO4 chipsets, Opteron 250 x2, Micro DDR400 2GBx4, nvidia Quadro FX1400x2, Hitachi SATA 250GB. Yes, the 32bit boot and work properly beside this message.
This is not enough info, please provide the hwinfo output.
Maybe there's a misunderstanding - what Karsten is asking you to do is to run the command "hwinfo" as super user, and attach the output to this bug report. Thanks!
Created attachment 70125 [details] hwinfo Add hwinfo. Thanks your kindly support.
Does 32bit boot and work properly beside this message ?
NEEDINFO for >2 weeks, not L3, likely harmless error message. Resolving.
I have provide hwinfo at 2006/02/24. And 32bit boot and work properly beside this message.
Sounds like an x86-64 vs 32bit issue then, but likely it's a BIOS problem which the kernel correctly notices, but which we can't do anything about. (And everything works beyond that, too.) Andi, just soliciting a second opinion as you're the x86-64 expert. Does this need some action or not? If not, please feel free to close.
The 64bit kernel never use 32bit BIOS like the PNP BIOS at runtime because they can be only called from 32bit mode. That is ok because it's assumed 64bit systems don't have ISA slots and PNP BIOS should be only needed for that. 6>PnPBIOS: Scanning system for PnP BIOS support... <6>PnPBIOS: Found PnP BIOS installation structure at 0xc00f7970 <6>PnPBIOS: PnP BIOS version 1.0, entry 0xf0000:0xb3d9, dseg 0x400 <2>PNPBIOS fault.. attempting recovery. <3>PnPBIOS: Warning! Your PnP BIOS caused a fatal error. Attempting to continu e <3>PnPBIOS: You may need to reboot with the "nobiospnp" option to operate stab ly <3>PnPBIOS: Check with your vendor for an updated BIOS <3>PnPBIOS: dev_node_info: unexpected status 0x28 <3>PnPBIOS: Unable to get node info. Aborting. What basically happened is that the 32bit kernel asked the PNPBIOS at boot if there are any slots it knows about. And it crashed while it did that. Probably nobody tested it ever. I would recommend to contact your motherboard/BIOS vendor, it's probably not a Linux problem. Adam B. also might know more about it.
Some newer boxes will ship with broken pnpbios support. This generally isn't an issue because ACPI supersedes PnPBIOS. In more recent Linux kernels, PnPBIOS is only enabled if ACPI initialization has failed (e.g. ACPI was blacklisted). Also, PnPBIOS is never used with x86_64. As an immediate work around, you may want to try booting with the kernel option "pnpbios=off". Thanks, Adam
If you still find this bug in openSUSE 11.0, please reopen this bugreport and change the product to "openSUSE 11.0". We will not fix this anymore, sorry for the long time to keep this open.