MP-BIOS bug: 8254; Plus, only one processor showing
 

I'm setting up an HP Proliant DL585 G2 server with four dual core AMD Opteron processsors. I set up Redhat AS 4 but I'm noticing a couple strange things. The first is that when it starts botting it reports these errors/messages:

Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8218 stepping 02
Total of 8 processors activated (41796.15 BogoMIPS).
..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
failed.
timer doesn't work through the IO-APIC - disabling NMI Watchdog!


Also, I don't know if this is related but when I run top it only reports one processor. Any ideas?

Thanks.

top depending on flags may just summarize CPUs.

To see how many CPUs you really have do "cat /proc/cpuinfo".

Not sure if it is necessary for RHEL AS 4 but when we loaded our RHEL AS 3 we were told to turn off hyperthreading in the BIOS Setup before doing the install. You might want to see if that has any effect.

Finally make sure when you see the grub menu that you are booting from the SMP kernel - that is the one that supports Symmetrical Multi-Processing (SMP) meaning multiple CPUs. Typically installs build both an SMP and non-SMP kernel so you may be picking the wrong one.

/proc/cpuinfo shows eight processors so I guess I'm good. By the way, do you know why turning off hyperthreading during the install was recommended with RHEL AS 3?

Not really. My research after the fact suggested that there was some suspicion that it hurt performance or at the very least added nothing to it. At the time it was done simply because that was a specification in the deployment guide we were using to install Oracle RAC.