I have installed and am currently running RHEL 5.2 (xen kernel) with no problems, but I would rather be running the 5.2 bare metal kernel version for reasons related to some of the apps I'm running.

I have tried running the 5.2 bare metal kernel, and I keep hitting some problem that causes the system to either fail to come up (I see random segmentation errors during daemon initialization) or it locks up unpredictably shortly after startup. I can't even keep it running long enough to complete a first update from the installation iso's to the latest level.

I assume my problems are kernel related since I can succesfully run the same exact 5.X system config w/the xen kernel.

Does anyone know where I can look for info on issues related to differences in how xen vs. bare metal 5.X kernels work?

Hook us up with some more info.

What hardware? Processor, memory, etc. Which “bare” metal kernel are trying to use? The 2.6.9-67.EL or 2.6.9-67ELsmp (the sub version is from version 4.6)?

It's 5.2, so it's a 2.6.18 kernel

Try the 2.6.18-92SMP kernel (same as "bare metal," but supports memory configurations up to 16GB).

Guys, thanks for the responses.

I am currently running "kernel-xen-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5" and it is working fine. I have done a test installs of bare metal RHEL 5.1 and 5.2 (both at the initial release bare metal kernel level since the system is so unstable that I cannot keep it running long enough to complete any updates).

My hardware is an Abit KV8 Pro MB running an Athlon 64 1800+ CPU w/1GB of DDR400 ram. The only slightly non-mainstream hardware item I use is an LSI20320-R RAID 0/1 SCSI adapter running a couple of U320 SCSI HDDs. FYI, I have been running this exact same hardware config successfully with bare metal RHEL 4 versions thru 4.6 with zero OS problems. Only when I moved to RHEL 5 did my OS problems start, but RHEL 5 has enough OS functional improvements over RHEL 4 that I do not want to go back.

Let me know if anymore details are needed.

Some new details:

I just installed the 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5 non-xen kernel on my current working system and set up Grub so I can selectively start either the xen or non-xen kernel at this latest 5.2 kernel level. The first run with the non-xen kernel worked fine for quite a while, but when I tried a restart it locked up during daemon load. Second restart got thru the daemon load but froze up just after.

So I guess my problem has not be resolved at the latest 5.2 kernel level.

I'm wondering if either one of your services in some form requires the Xen kernel (although I can't see why), or perhaps (and I'd guess this is more likely), some form of hardware problem - maybe memory.

Have you run memtest on this system?