[ale] Interesting problem with Intel S1200BTSR MB

[Chris Fowler]

I'm not expecting you guys to fix this one.  It is an odd one.  I'm just 
documenting it and maybe someone else would have seen this behaviour.

I have 2 systems based on this MB.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121619

System has 2 128GB SSD drives.

Running CentOS 6:

2.6.32-431.20.3.el6.x86_64

Before vacation I placed one of my management devices with this system 
and configured serial terminal.  I got this working.

The odd behaviour came on reboot.  When I issued a reboot the last 
message on the serial console was "Restarting system".  The system 
appeared to hang.  If I restarted via the reset button the system may 
not boot.  I would see the BIOS post on my LCD, but nothing when 
accessing the SSD.   I ran out of time so I rigged up X10 control so 
that from PCB I could cycle power.  The only way I could get it to boot 
when i experienced this behaviour was to pull power.  X10 solved it.

I had done some much, upgrade, add PCI card, etc that I decided to 
narrow it down before I left.  When I disabled serial console in Grub 
and the OS problem went away.   My conclusion was that this problem may 
not be specific to the Linux kernel, but something about the hardware on 
the MB.  The BIOS does support console redirection, but I've yet tested 
it to see if that fixes the problem.

I run my system headless at Peak 10 using serial console so not having a 
serial console on this one makes me nervous.  I have power control there 
too so I only visit to touch hardware.

This is the first time I experinced a problem like this that was linked 
to running serial console in Linux.

Chris

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