Jaunty 9.04 alpha x86_64 needs "nohpet option" to boot

Bug #318636 reported by Peter Trenholme
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
linux (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

The 2.627, 2.6.28 and (I believe, but haven't checked) 2.6.29 kernels, when HPET is enabled (at least on the AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-60 cpu), halt waiting for interrupts during the initrd processing. That "wait" can be cleared by manual intervention (e.g., holding down the "shift" key). It seems that the interrupt may be associated with timing disk access, but that's just a guess on my part.

Since that processor is fairly common in laptops, many people who are not aware of the problem will experience an apparent "hang" during the boot. Some few of those will report a bug, whilst others will be discouraged and "warn off" other users. (And I really don't know if the problem is processor dependent, since I have only tried it on this HP DV9700us laptop.)

The solution (or work around) is to add the "nohpet" option to the kernel line in the GRUB menu.lst, but it shouldn't be too hard to devise some test to be performed during the install that could automate that process.

Note that I first experienced this problem when I installed Fedora 10 on my laptop, so I was not dismayed when my first Jaunty boot seemed to "hang." Note also that this kernel bug has been reported to, and discussed by, the kernel developers, but -- since I don't follow those discussions -- I have no idea of the state of the resolution of the bug.

This report refers specifically to the 9.04 Alpha 2 GNOME distribution, but I think it is more a kernel problem that a specific Jaunty one.

P.S.: Other that that and the fact that I can't get the nVidia driver to compile (which is not, of course, your problem) Jaunty alpha seems solid and a real improvement. Thanks for the good work.

Revision history for this message
Peter Trenholme (ptrenholme) wrote :

This problem seems to have been fixed in kernel 2.6.28-7 in the Jaunty development tree.

Revision history for this message
Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig) wrote :

Reporter states it's fixed in a newer kernel.

Revision history for this message
drachenstern (drachenstern) wrote :

I think this bug is repeating per the new release. Should I introduce a new bug or would we prefer to reopen this one? Everything listed in the above section matches my experience. Using 9.04 Desktop AMD64. Similar laptop, same CPU. Same boot experience. Will try a reboot with said tag if possible, see what I get.

Revision history for this message
drachenstern (drachenstern) wrote :

Since I can't edit my last post to save on number of posts, here goes.

Second boot, sequence, duplicates issue. Tertiary boot using given flag shows marked change in behaviour. Hope this helps, hope someone else can verify.

In case it helps, I've attached my `uname -a`, `lspci`, and `dmesg` outputs with
#################
as a spacer text in one file.

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