CPUs are computers

So I wanted to get a Shuttle DX30 working under LTSP. First step, it uses a pxe-client-id that's 9 bytes long. CentOS's dhcpd throws away anything that doesn't have a 17 byte pxe-client-id. I have no idea why. I tried poking around the RFCs but didn't find much of interest.

Once I patched dhcped, PXE booting worked and I managed to load a kernel. Except it was slow.

Very.

Very.

Very.

Slow.

Just how slow? It took over 30 minutes to get to a XDM prompt slow.

I saw Machine check events going past. To track those down, I put my laptop's 2.5 inch HDD into it. This was also slow. While not as bad, it was clearly not working properly. But I got mcelog to grab the following:

mcelog: failed to prefill DIMM database from DMI data
mcelog: mcelog read: No such device
Hardware event. This is not a software error.
MCE 0
CPU 0 BANK 4 
ADDR fef5d200 
TIME 1531800239 Tue Jul 17 00:03:59 2018
MCG status:
MCi status:
Error overflow
Uncorrected error
MCi_ADDR register valid
Processor context corrupt
MCA: Internal unclassified error: 408
Running trigger `unknown-error-trigger'
STATUS e600000000020408 MCGSTATUS 0
MCGCAP c07 APICID 0 SOCKETID 0 
CPUID Vendor Intel Family 6 Model 92

After some messing around, cursing the Gods, discussing Intel NUCs on #ltsp, general lack of sleep, I found the solution : kernel-ml

yum -y  --enablerepo=elrepo-kernel install kernel-ml
joe /etc/grub.conf # set default=0

It should be noted it took over 10 minutes for dracut to create the initrd for kernel-ml. But once I then booted into the new kernel, everything was fine. I installed kernel-lt as a test, because it needs the CPU and the disk to run smoothly and it took 2 minutes, which is annoying but expected. For reference, installing kernel-ml on my desktop takes 1.5 minutes but it has an SSD.

kernel-lt was a failure, 9m54 to install kernel-ml-4.17.5-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64. I booted back into kernel-ml, removed and reinstalled kernel-ml-4.17.5-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64 and it took 1m52. So kernel-ml is the clear winner.

Now to find out how to install kernel-ml into LTSP.