Comment 68 for bug 63418

first attempt at replying failed...second time lucky...

I'm getting (or was getting as I downgraded to Dapper again) "BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!". Many times I would also get an error about kernel panic...in fact I got kernel panics more often than soft lockups, but I cannot remember the whole error message with the kernel panic.

When I boot-up with nosplash, I immediately get 4 error/warning messages, which I get even with Dapper:

"PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 7 of the bridge 0000:00:06.0"

...or region 8, and then most of the time, I would get the soft lockup message (only in Edgy). In Dapper, these 4 initial errors do not seem to affect the rest of the boot process and I have never had any issues running Dapper. Sometimes (very rarely), I could boot all the way into X after the upgrade to Edgy, but as soon as I started typing my login name, it would freeze and I would need to reboot. Once, after I did a clean install of Edgy, I could get into the GUI, but it would freeze at random points after a short while.

As I am upgrading, acer_acpi, the module that turns on my wireless, does not work in the new kernel, so I need to compile and install it again, but because the lockups happen so quickly, even when booting in safe mode, I do not get chance to do any of this.

If I upgrade again to Edgy, is it possible to keep 2.6.15-27-amd64-k8 kernel by removing the commented out section in grubs menu.lst, and boot using that with Edgy? If that is possible then I could at least have Edgy until the kernel is fixed. Another workaround I thought about was to upgrade to a 'knot' release of Edgy with an earlier kernel than 2.6.17-10 where the bug is not present, ans then continue to upgrade everything apart from the kernel until this is solved.

--andrew