agpgart detection hangs FC5 boot process on IBM xSeries 300

[Giles Orr]

My brother has an older IBM xSeries 300 (I think that's the correct
name) at work, and they're trying to run Fedora Core 5 on it.  I would
have suggested another distro, but they need FC5 for a specific
application, or so they're told by their consultant.  The machine is a
1U server, Celeron 950MHz(?), dual IBM NICs, 640Mb memory, S3 Savage
Pro 4 video.  The installation goes fine, and everything works fine if
you run the CD in rescue mode - the NICs work, but everything is text
mode.  They aren't concerned with X.

The real problem comes when you try to boot from the installed FC
2.6.15 kernel.  It hangs on boot every time.  I used GRUB's command
line to removed "rhgb" (Red Hat Graphical Boot, which wasn't running
anyway), and "quiet".  After I'd done that, I could see we were
getting to agpgart detection, at which point the server hangs.  The
video card is onboard and the system sees it as PCI rather than AGP.
We don't need to use RAM for video memory since we're not using X.
But I can't figure out how to stop the kernel from trying to detect
agpgart.  I tried kernel command line parameters "noagpgart" and
"agpgart=no" but both of these were wild guesses and didn't change
anything.  With the HD in a different box (another Celeron they had
around, but a desktop not a server) I compiled a new kernel using the
latest kernel.???.src.rpm and rpmbuild ... I tried to comment out any
configuration of AGPGART, but apparently I wasn't successful (I'm NOT
a kernel expert): it's a 2.6.20 kernel that runs fine in the desktop
but tanks at the same place in the IBM.  It's interesting and annoying
that the install/rescue kernel DOESN'T tank on agpgart detection, but
I don't know how to capitalize on that.

Any and all suggestions welcome.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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