Comment 19 for bug 558569

Leo adding vmalloc=268435456 to the line with "quite splash" was what I wanted, thanks. But your syslog missed any reference to viafb even the startup message (probably it didn't get written to disk prior to freeze) so I didn't see anything in there.
Anyway by using the fact that
- the very same IGP works for some people
- the crash happens very early (even when the module refuses to work) but seems to also happen if it would likely work (with the vmalloc option)
I can think only of one code area, the I2C code, that could cause this as the rest are fairly simple PCI commands. Maybe the manufacturers of your boards did some strange things as is done in OLPC (where this just causes half a minute delay). But maybe I'm just missing something obvious here.
However debugging this and finding the right fix will be something that takes a while (and a lot of help from people who experience this bug). There is a slight chance (although relatively low) that this will be fixed in 2.6.35-rc2 as Jon posted some changes to the I2C code (not explicitly labled as fixes so don't expect too much).
It also could be helpful if somebody would test Harald's old tree, located at
http://git.gnumonks.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=linux-2.6-via.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/via-viafb
but I do not expect it to work any better (although it did sometimes in the past). If I knew that this does not work I could ask him for help as he has better connections to VIA and is more experienced than me. So if you want to give it a try this might be a starting point
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/KnowledgeBase
I won't provide any help in compiling and installing your own test kernel as my advice would likely lead to screwing your system up.
Sorry that I can't be a big help but there is not much I can do without knowing what exactly goes wrong and therefore prefer to concentrate on the things I can actually do without too much guesswork.