[GLLUG] Rocky Linux on HP ML350G6 - Motherboard failure??

[Ken Smith]

Hi All, This might seem a bit of an off the wall question. Would running 
the 5.4 Kernel stress a system such that it could cause a motherboard 
failure? I can't think how but.....

More details — I’m running (or was running) various KVM VM’s as well as 
MythTV server on the host machine with Rocky Linux 8.5 (Kernel 4.18) 
with a couple of DVB PCIe capture cards. I have found that there is an 
anomaly in the stock DVB driver for those cards, in the 4.18 kernel 
causing the DVB card to stop responding in some situations. I loaded 5.4 
Kernel from ELRepo, that is supposedly built from the standard config. 
Although it does not have the DVB media driver stack, I built the 
current DVB Media stack from source. The anomaly is supposed to be fixed 
in the current version of DVB media drivers.

All was working fine for a few hours and this, I hope, is complete 
co-incidence, the machine crashed and it now appears that the BIOS is 
corrupt. It will show some of the Post messages but the options to enter 
BIOS Setup (RBSU in HP speak) don’t work and it won’t boot anything. 
Neither the Raid array, a USB stick or from PXE on the network. I’ve 
tried swapping memory and stripping the machine down to the bare minimum 
to start up and resetting it to factory default. No luck. I have a 
replacement motherboard on order. My health monitoring of this machine 
with Zabbix did not log any significant anomalies in the last few 
moments of uptime, no excess temperatures, power consumption or 
processor load etc. ILO, which still works, does not show any errors or 
alerts either.

But one doubt I have is that this happened just 3 hours after I started 
running the 5.4 kernel. It seems a bit far fetched, but is that part of 
the picture here or just pure coincidence? I realise I could simply 
replace the DVB driver stack in the stock kernel by compiling it up from 
source. That is an option too.

Any pearls of wisdom either about my question or about recovering a 
miscreant ML350 motherboard that won't boot anything or go into the 
setup pages.

Thanks

Ken



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