Blank screen when booting from ISO on Dell R240 server

Hardware
1

So, our small office in Bangalor has finally purchased a proper 1U rack server (and not the one I recommended - sigh). I can get it to boot without issues to Ubuntu 16.04 Server ISO (using remote management console from a remote desktop session at that office to provide virtual media). IPFire 2.25.x86_64-full-core141 and core144 ISOs fail to display anything past grub, even in text mode. I have spent the day trying to remotely debug it from Portland, Oregon. Needless to say, this has been very painful to do remotely.

I’m going to see if I can get a virtual serial output running, see if it has any more info. Suggestions?

2

Serial over IPMI proved to be very helpful. Here is the kernel panic output, shortly after booting to the filesystem (earlyprintk exited, console started):

Kernel panic - not syncing: timer doesn’t work through Interrupt-remapped IO-APIC
CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 4.14.173-ipfire #1
Hardware name: Dell Inc. PowerEdge R240/0DRR0P, BIOS 2.2.3 09/27/2019
Call Trace:
dump_stack+0x66/0x89
panic+0xe7/0x238
? delay_tsc+0x1e/0x50
panic_if_irq_remap.cold+0x5/0xe
setup_IO_APIC+0x6bd/0xf76
apic_bsp_setup+0xc7/0xf9
native_smp_prepare_cpus+0x3c7/0x4ef
kernel_init_freeable+0xc5/0x2e2
? rest_init+0x9a/0x9a
kernel_init+0xa/0xf0
ret_from_fork+0x35/0x40
—[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: timer doesn’t work through Interrupt-remapped IO-APIC

3

Ok, figured out the issue. Had to disable X2APIC in the bios. Eventually figured it out but had to boot with ‘noapic nolapic’ for the kernel to actually display a message to disable x2apic. Should be resolved in a kernel update (Ubuntu 16.04 4.14-hwe kernel works fine).

4

This seems to become a common issue with those systems now. Recently, somebody else reporting similar problems…

I cannot find the post right now.

But great this is working for you now.

5

It’s this topic where I got the problem with a Dell Optiplex C521 + Athlon 64 CPU: Dual Opteron Grub Problem