Comment 42 for bug 712082

Revision history for this message
Scott Lavender (slavender) wrote :

I have had almost consistent kernel panics during boot, probably four out of five boots results in kernel panic.

It was difficult trying to ascertain when the panic occurred because from the visual cues. Sometimes it would result in text on the screen and sometimes not, but always with a hard locked system and flashing caps/scroll lock. Sometimes it would panic before the grub menu, sometimes directly after the grub menu. Sometimes grub would go to the menu, other times it would skip the menu.

However, I focused on the kernel.

persia suggested that I start with a Maverick install, replace natty for maverick in my /etc/apt/sources.list, and selectively upgrade using aptitude excluding the kernel. Then I could download from Launchpad and install each kernel available for Natty in order to find the offending kernel.

Unfortunately, even excluding the linux kernel update I found that my new Natty install still suffered from kernel panic at the same rate. I attempted updating using aptitude twice with the same results.

For my third attempt I decided to exclude grub packages in addition to the kernel packages. These are the packages that I did NOT update/add to an updated Maverick installation:
 * linux-headers-2.6.38-1
 * linux-headers-2.6.38-1-generic
 * linux-image-2.6.38-1-generic
 * grub-common
 * grub-pc
 * linux-firmware
 * linux-generic
 * linux-headers-generic
 * linux-image-generic

As noted above, everything list was previously excluded from my two hand updates, with the except of the two grub packages, which resulted in continued kernel panics.

After the third update my computer experienced a single panic directly after rebooting from the update but hasn't panicked since. I now have almost ten reboots without problems.

Therefore I wonder if grub could be at least partially responsible for the intermittent kernel panics.

If anyone would like me to attach any logs or reports to this bug report please let me know. I'll keep the machine as is for several days and continue to test the reboots for panic problems.