Comment 1 for bug 102982

This bug is confirmed with the Feisty Fawn Beta on my Sony Vaio VGN-FS195VP with an built in Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG switched off during boot up. Here is the important part of the dmesg output:

[ 28.456000] intel_rng: FWH not detected
[ 28.820000] iTCO_vendor_support: vendor-support=0
[ 28.872000] iTCO_wdt: Intel TCO WatchDog Timer Driver v1.01 (11-Nov-2006)
[ 28.872000] iTCO_wdt: failed to reset NO_REBOOT flag, reboot disabled by hardware
[ 28.872000] iTCO_wdt: No card detected

So - in my opinion - there seem to be two different causes for these messages: the first one is that the intel kernel driver does somehow not detect his own firmware hub (FWH), and the second one is that watchdog does not yet support the Intel TCO. Let aside the annoying kernel messages, there is a major boot up interruption involved with watchdog looking for the Intel hardware (sometimes up to one or two minutes).

One simple solution to this problem is to put intel_rng - and eventually also iTCO_wdt - into the blacklist (/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist), but this disables both modules (and has not been personally tested). Another way is to edit the init file for the network (/etc/rcS.d/S40networking) and comment out the following the lines:

case "$1" in
start)
 log_action_begin_msg "Configuring network interfaces"
        type usplash_write >/dev/null 2>/dev/null && usplash_write "TIMEOUT 120" || true
# if [ "$VERBOSE" != no ]; then
# if ifup -a; then
# log_action_end_msg $?
# else
# log_action_end_msg $?
# fi
# else
# if ifup -a >/dev/null 2>&1; then
# log_action_end_msg $?
# else
# log_action_end_msg $?
# fi
# fi
        type usplash_write >/dev/null 2>/dev/null && usplash_write "TIMEOUT 15" || true
 ;;

stop)

These are just work arounds, and I hope that this bug will be solved soon.Good luck!