> I have under supervision a few old servers running 11.2-STABLE. The
> hardware is almost for retirement, but still in working condition. It's
> all old Nocona NetBurst microarchitecture. I have recently tried do
> upgrade OS two of them to 12.0-STABLE, but failed. When I use old
> bootloader the boot freezes on blue highlighted "Booting" stage,
when I
> tried to use 12 loader, it freezes earlier, on loading kernel modules.
> The kernel was compiled from fresh sources for CPUTYPE?=nocona.
> 11.2-STABLE is fine with this optimization and the same kernel boots
> fine on newer hardware.
>
> It is fair, that 11 EOL is expected September 30, 2021 and these servers
> will likely be retired before this date, but some questions arise:
>
> Is such old hardware still supported? Is it possible (how to) debug the
> booting process?
The first step is to try with known-good bits: can you boot these machines off
the 12.0 ISO or memstick images? Can you load your kernel and modules with the
loader from the ISO/memstick? Does GENERIC built without any flags work?
If any of these don?t work, try to be as specific as possible when reporting
problems. For example, the exact make of mainboard (kenv output) and the BIOS
version, and any relevant BIOS settings are likely important for problems
regarding the loader. If the kernel and modules load, you can try a verbose boot
to see better how far the kernel gets.
I?d be really surprised if the CPUs themselves would cause trouble.
Stefan
--
Stefan Bethke <stb at lassitu.de> Fon +49 151 14070811