Intel Icelake based systems may fail with a kernel panic on boot

This document (000020579) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

Situation

Intel Icelake based systems may fail to boot with a kernel panic similar to:

[ 0.307809] BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000018
[ 0.307809] #PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode
[ 0.307809] #PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page
[ 0.307809] PGD 0 P4D 0
[ 0.307809] Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP NOPTI
[ 0.307809] CPU: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 5.3.18-24.52-default #1 SLE15-SP2
[ 0.307809] Hardware name: Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650-N V2/7D1NCTO1WW, BIOS U8E110F-1.00 11/25/2020
[ 0.307809] RIP: 0010:tick_nohz_get_sleep_length+0x36/0x90

The kernel was booted with acpi=off.

Resolution

ACPI based platforms booted with acpi=off might fail to boot or have all sorts of runtime problems and we highly discourage using this option. If a platform does not comply with ACPI specification then we recommend contacting the hardware vendor rather than running the kernel with acpi=off.

Disclaimer

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