Bug ID 431361: AWS BIG-IP/BIG-IQ instances might fail to start up properly

Last Modified: Apr 28, 2025

Affected Product(s):
BIG-IP Install/Upgrade, LTM(all modules)

Known Affected Versions:
11.3.0, 11.4.0, 11.4.1

Fixed In:
11.5.0, 11.4.1 HF4, 11.4.1 HF3, 11.4.0 HF6, 11.3.0 HF9

Opened: Sep 22, 2013

Severity: 1-Blocking

Related Article: K14948

Symptoms

The BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) and BIG-IQ VE instances might fail to start up properly on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. This issue occurs because the VE instance cannot properly instantiate CPU cores and virtual devices after recently upgrading the hypervisor on the AWS platform.

Impact

The AWS BIG-IP or BIG-IQ instance is not accessible and cannot process traffic. Also, just after boot up, the system might produce Linux kernel stack traces similar to the following: Stack: Call Trace: Code: 31 62 81 48 89 1d 2c b7 5a 00 48 89 58 08 89 6b 28 e8 69 2e 2b 00 0f ae f0 4c 89 f7 ff 15 5c 9c 5b 00 80 7c 24 07 00 75 04 eb 08 <f3> 90 f6 43 20 01 75 f8 5a 5b 5d 41 5c 41 5d 41 5e 41 5f c3 48

Conditions

This occurs on a newly rebooted or deployed VE instance using one of the following Amazon Machine Images (AMI), released before 01/21/2014, from the AWS Marketplace: -- F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for AWS (BYOL) version 11.4.0 -- F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition for AWS (BYOL) version 11.3.0 -- F5 BIG-IQ Virtual Edition for AWS (BYOL) version 4.1.0.

Workaround

If you have not rebooted the AWS BIG-IP/BIG-IQ instance, contact F5 Technical Support to request an engineering hotfix, and install the engineering hotfix in a new slot. To prevent the issue from occurring, reboot to the new slot containing the engineering hotfix. If you have already rebooted the AWS BIG-IP/BIG-IQ instance, you can recover by rebuilding the AWS instance using the updated AMI from the AWS marketplace. Important: If you do not have a backup copy of the affected instance's UCS archive file, you must reconfigure the instance from scratch. For more information, see SOL14948: Amazon Web Services BIG-IP and BIG-IQ instances may fail to start up properly, available here: http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/14000/900/sol14948.html.

Fix Information

With the AWS marketplace release of the BIG-IP 11.4.1 AMI on 1/21/14 (contains all fixes included in BIG-IP 11.4.1 HF3) and the BIG-IQ 4.2.0 AMI on 1/24/14, the AWS BIG-IP/BIG-IQ instances now start up properly.

Behavior Change

Guides & references

K10134038: F5 Bug Tracker Filter Names and Tips