Dell D600 + RTL8185L = livecd boot hang through 11.04a3

[floid]

[Edited - problems still observed with 10.10 RC]

Symptoms: Attempting to boot 10.04 from the LiveCD or from a fresh install with the alternate CD, and 10.10 RC LiveCD, results in a hang around the time the boot splash animation reaches the final 'dot.' The boot splash animation also comes up with a corrupt/'psychedelic' palette. The graphic stays frozen on the screen, the fan runs, and the keyboard becomes unresponsive, making troubleshooting annoying.

Booting the 10.04 alternate CD to the console worked. Somewhat quirkily, an install from the 10.04 alternate CD also worked when rebooted after the apparent hang, but something (a post-install script?) got addled, because I can both reach the console or startx with no problem, but dbus was not starting properly and gdm et al. refused to work. I looked around for the obvious culprit on *that* but couldn't find it at the time, and now that I have returned to the problem I'm focusing on getting 10.10 up.

Booting/installing 9.04 or thereabouts actually works, so it does not seem to be an innate hardware problem.

Hardware configuration:
Dell Latitude D600 laptop; 512MB RAM; 1024x768 LCD with what identifies as a RV250; only hardware quirks are use of a UDMA CompactFlash card in place of a disk and use of a generic Realtek-based miniPCI wireless card.

---

I had asked if someone could summarize the parameters necessary to turn graphical boot off and watch dmesg/console up to the point that it hangs; thanks to Gordon Hopper for obliging.

Using 10.10 RC on a USB stick [my CD burns have complained about a sense error on one particular sector on multiple devices]:

- With default options, but the 'splash' and 'quiet' removed, I make it to:
 "* Setting sensors limits"

- With 'text', and the 'nomodeset' and 'acpi=off' boxes checked for good measure, I make it to:
 "* Pulseaudio configured for per-user sessions"

Somewhere between these extremes, it can freeze at the message between them, this being:
"* Starting Kernel Oops catching service kerneloops"

I have gone so far as to unplug the "HD" (a CF card in CF-to-IDE carrier) and to attempt to set BIOS options as conservatively as possible [but perhaps I have missed something].

This does not seem to be the best way to debug the problem. Insight / further suggestions are appreciated - surely there's a way to make booting more verbose than this?

[Gordon Hopper (gohopper)]

To get debug information while booting, remove the 'splash' and 'quiet' options from the boot command. If booting with the liveCD, press F6 (other options) to display/edit the boot command. If booting with grub, press 'e' (edit) to modify the boot command. (See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/KernelTeamBugPolicies#Bootloader for more)

[floid (jkanowitz)]

Fails in a similar way at a similar point with the daily:
maverick-desktop-i386.iso 05-Oct-2010 09:15 693M Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86) computers (standard download)

Particularly, still makes it exactly to "* Pulseaudio configured for per-user sessions" with all 'dangerous' options turned off in the menu + 'text', and to the speech-dispatcher with simply 'text'.

[floid (jkanowitz)]

I'm chagrined to report that this continued to be a problem with 11.04 Alpha 3, but removing the third-party-surplus-sourced "Arima"-branded RTL8185L wireless card allows the installer to boot flawlessly.

Obviously this is suboptimal for those who manage to have that hardware present and don't want to rip it out to install. Unfortunately without more verbose output even a text boot is not particularly helpful for debugging just *what* is going haywire and freezing the machine [apparently around the time it goes to configure that interface].

I have two of the apparently-troublesome cards in two D600s, and the freeze with the hardware installed reproduces in both of them across a couple BIOS versions. That's all I've got so far.

Other OSes [DragonFly BSD, FreeDOS ...] are not as intrinsically bothered by the RTL8185L card being present.

[floid (jkanowitz)]

Popping the card back into a happily installed system results in a freeze somewhere just after the Radeon drm initializes and:

"* Starting AppArmor profiles";
"Skipping profile in /etc/apparmor.d/disable: usr.bin.firefox [ OK ]".

Thoughts on how to proceed will be appreciated.

[floid (jkanowitz)]

With some sleep, blacklisting rtl8180 is obviously the short-term workaround, and this is a dupe of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/368679

[penalvch (penalvch)]

floid, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

Also, could you please test the latest upstream kernel available following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds ? It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Please do not test the daily folder, but the one all the way at the bottom. Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please comment on which kernel version specifically you tested. If this bug is fixed in the mainline kernel, please add the following tags:
kernel-fixed-upstream
kernel-fixed-upstream-VERSION-NUMBER

where VERSION-NUMBER is the version number of the kernel you tested. For example:
kernel-fixed-upstream-v3.11-rc5

This can be done by clicking on the yellow circle with a black pencil icon next to the word Tags located at the bottom of the bug description. As well, please remove the tag:
needs-upstream-testing

If the mainline kernel does not fix this bug, please add the following tags:
kernel-bug-exists-upstream
kernel-bug-exists-upstream-VERSION-NUMBER

As well, please remove the tag:
needs-upstream-testing

Once testing of the upstream kernel is complete, please mark this bug's Status as Confirmed. Please let us know your results. Thank you for your understanding.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]