[c-nsp] Sup720 crashing at RP boot - HW revision dependent ?

[Marcus.Gerdon]

Hi @all,

yesterday I've been hit by a somewhat strange - and possibly worrying -
effect with Sup720 in 6500.

I've got 3 Sup720-3BXL, one with an older HW revision (Sup: 4.4 / PFC:
1.6 / MSFC: 2.5) and 2 with newer (Sup: 5.2 / PFC: 1.8 / MSFC: 2.5). All
three have been tested in a 6509 successfully by the supplier. According
the test sheets they've used a Rev. 3.0 chassis.

For offline testing and preparation I've an 6509 and 6506 spare chassis
at hands, both of them being Rev. 2.0.

When trying to boot those Sup in my 6509 the older one boots fine and
everything is ok. The newer ones both start to boot and after switching
to boot the RP it stalls (download doesn't even start, hangs after
memory is displayed). After a minute or two a 'software forced crash'
occurs and I'm thrown do SP rommon.

Up to this point no updates, config changes or anything other than
plugging them in the chassis and turning the power on has been done.

It doesn't matter if they're put in slot 5 or 6, if the working one is
already active in slot 5 or if I'm manually booting from rommon instead
of autoboot. Also the IOS used doesn't change anything (18SXF, 18SXI,
17SXd)

Interestingly in the Rev. 2.0 6506 all three are booting fine. I've done
both rom updates in the 6506 and tried again in the 6509 - without any
change.

To me this looks like there's some dependancy between HW revisions of
the Sup or PFC (MSFC rev. is the same on all threee) and the 6509
chassis (6506 wasn't effected). 

I've searched cisco.com for quite some time but without any hint to this
issue. The only thing I found was that there're a few 6509-NEB eeprom
updates to be applied to the chassis itself. So in fact there is some
active rom part with the chassis that supposedly will differ between
revisions.


Does someone stumbled upon this, had similar issues or maybe even know
or did see any document (comp. matrix, workaround or alike) about this ?



regards,

Marcus