I installed the latest 2.6.18 kernel (kernel-smp-2.6.18-ovz028stab049.1.x86_64.rpm) and rebooted and the server failed to come up. So I reinstalled the previous version (kernel-smp-2.6.18-ovz028stab047.1.x86_64.rpm) and it failed too. The problem started after upgrading to Fedora 8 so that's what is suspect. The system worked fine with the kernel-smp-2.6.18-ovz028stab047.1.x86_64.rpm kernel but reinstalling the rpm makes it fail. It starts to boot up and stalls. The last thing on the screen is something like: mounting /proc mounting /sysfs creating /dev If I have a mouse connected it will then give me a message about the mouse. Then it hangs waiting for somthing. No error messages and ctrl-alt-delete works. Otherwise it just sits there. I'm currently running a 2.6.22 kernel that was installed before the upgrade. Wish I had more information.
Hope you can do more testing on that machine. Does Alt+SysRq keys working? If yes, what Alt-SysRq-P and Alt-SysRq-T show?
Just tried it on my home computer. Those keys didn't do anything. Here's some more details: Freeing unused kernel memory: 240k freed Red Hat nash version 6.0.19 Mounting proc filesystem Mounting sysfs filesystem Creating /dev So it just sits there. So - what is actually running at this point? Hardware is Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard. nVidia chipset. AMD AM2 dual core processor. What's important here is that if the kernel was already installed - it works. But if a new kernel is installed or an old kernel reinstalled then it fails. So it's the installation of the RPM that's the issue.
Marc, I filed a bug to our Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.openvz.org/734), we will investigate.
Unless it is related to hardware I think there's a good chance that if you try an install of F8 (64 bit) you will see the problem.
I just tried the 2.6.22 kernel and it does NOT have the same problem. My guess is that the Fedora 8 environment doesn't like kernels as old as 2.6.18.