Compute Node Boot Issue Symptom: Message About Invalid EEPROM Checksum in Node Console or Log

On rare occasions, the processor hardware may lose the Serial Over Lan (SOL) connections and may need to be reseated to allow the node to successfully boot.

Symptoms

This issue can be identified if the following is displayed in the node’s console or log:

console.38:2018-09-08 04:54:51 [   16.721165] ixgbe 0000:18:00.0: The EEPROM Checksum Is Not Valid
console.38:2018-09-08 04:55:00 [   25.768872] ixgbe 0000:18:00.1: The EEPROM Checksum Is Not Valid

The following figure shows that the EEPROM checksum errors lead to a dracut-initqueue timeout, and eventually cause the node to drop into the dracut emergency shell.

EEPROM Error Dropping to Dracut Emergency Shell

Problem Detection

Run dmidecode from the compute node to identify its model. H87926-500 is the silver model that may exhibit this issue, whereas the production model, H87926-550, does not exhibit SOL connection issues.

cmp4:~ # dmidecode|grep H87926
        Version: H87926-550

Resolution

One way to resolve this issue is to ensure that the latest ixgbe network driver is installed on the nodes.