Symptom

RHEL8.1/RHEL8.2 fails to boot up and reports the error message "exit_boot() failed!" and "efi_main() failed!" after updating drivers or changing UEFI configuration for an adapter.

(where UEFI = Unified Extensible Firmware Interface)

Affected Configurations

The system is configured with at least one of the following:

• RHEL 8.1, any version
• RHEL 8.2 , any OS RedHat, any version

This tip is not system specific.

This tip is not option specific.

The system has the symptom described above.

Note: This does not imply that the network operating system will work under all combinations of hardware and software.

Please see the compatibility page for more information: http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/serverproven/

Solution

Red Hat has released the Z-stream kernel which contains the fix. The issue is tracked in:

​https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1824005

Refer to more information about Z-stream kernel of RHEL8.2 at the URL:

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2020:3010

Upgrade to kernel-4.18.0-193.13.2.el8_2.x86_64.rpm

Additional Information

The issue occurs when there are a larger number of devices installed on the system, which may cause the memmap to be divided into multiple segments. In this case, the size of the previous reservation may become insufficient for the multiple memory segments.

For more info, please refer to the upstream kernel commit ID b84a64fad40637b1c9fa4f4dbf847a23e29e672b, which had this issue corrected on Nov 29 2018. The fix is integrated into RHEL8.1/RHEL8.2 Z-stream kernel.

Refer to the Red Hat KB article: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5091541