Edgy regression on AMD64 makes machine unusable (CRITICAL)

[jmspeex]

I'm resubmitting #66500 because I no longer think it's an X.Org bug. It *looks* like a kernel problem now because it affects too many things. The result is that Edgy (beta and RC) is totally unusable on my machine, crashing/hanging after a few minutes. Other than the crashes, symptoms include:
- Sometimes hangs for 1-2 minutes during boot without any activity
- Sometimes keys I press on the keyboard get repeated
- gnome-panel animations are *very* slow.
- Most GUI applications freeze when I click on a button
- Some applications (e.g. ssh server) tend to crash very often
- Ping reports "Warning: time of day goes back, taking countermeasures"
- Similar time problems reported by the window manager (don't have the log anymore)

The above info makes it look like it could be related to gettimeofday() or something like that. Some more observations:
- Disabling one of the CPU cores in the BIOS makes the random problems less frequent, but they don't go away (machine still crashes)
- I tried both the i810 and the vesa drivers and there's no difference

So far, I tested the following distros:
Dapper i386: Runs OK
Edgy i386: Runs OK
Dapper amd64: Runs OK
Edgy beta amd64: BUGGY
Edgy RC amd64: BUGGY
Debian Etch testing AMD64: BUGGY

My setup is:
Dell Latitude D820 laptop
CPU: Core 2 Duo 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM
Intel embedded 950 graphics
No binary-only video card driver (or similar crap)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. No need to resubmit, you can change the package for the previous bug or open a linux task by example. Marking as duplicated

[jmspeex (jean-marc-valin)]

More tests:
- Booting amd64 Edgy with Dapper's amd64 kernel results in about the same behaviour as Dapper itself (not counting the stuff that requires a newer kernel), so it's probably kernel related.
- With amd64 Dapper, I'm still getting some crashes, but not the other symptoms.
- Just before crashing with Dapper, I got (in dmesg): "
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed
warning: many lost ticks
Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging interrupts
"