Illegible characters displayed on console during boot in AFF and FAS series

Applies to

• FAS Platforms
• AFF Platforms
• Console connection

Issue

• After the system POSTS, illegible characters are displayed:

Portions Copyright (c) 2011-2014 NetApp. All Rights Reserved
Phoenix SecureCore Tiano(TM)
Copyright 1985-2015 Phoenix Technologies Ltd.
All Rights Reserved

Build Date: 06/18/2014
**********************************************
* 9.1.1 *
* ================================== *
* PHOENIX SC-T 2009-2015 *
**********************************************
CPU = 1 Processor(s) Detected, Cores per Processor = 8
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2658 @ 2.10GHz
32768 MB System RAM Installed
256 KB L2 Cache
System BIOS shadowed
Video BIOS shadowed
USB Device: MICRON eUSB DISK
��������PPPPPPPP��������������PPPPPPPP������������������������������

Note: The characters seen in the output are randomly generated and might be in totally different order and form

Node may fail to boot:

• Node doesn't boot past loading the image:

• Additionally, Illegible characters are displayed on the loader prompt:

• If this occurs during an ONTAP upgrade, the upgrade will pause until issue is resolve
• In some instances, the node will shutdown with no explanation or fail to boot
• And in some cases you will see high SP load traffic which is seen on below logs

SP events log

[SP.notice] SP load is high 4.70 3.29 2.04
[SP.notice] SP load is high 5.02 3.85 2.39
[SP.notice] SP load is high 6.51 6.35 5.58

SP syslog

(none) : [336 INFO]handle_ipmi_query: Server Error: Server Is Busy
(none) : [336 INFO]Error in handle_ipmi_query()
(none) : [336 INFO]Failed to Send Message to SPEM