From: Brad Barnett <bahb@L8R.net> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=112265436500006&r=1&w=2 Pentium M 725, 512M ram. This laptop will simply not boot with any Debian precompiled kernel, with the exception of Debian's 2.4.27-2 initrd kernel. I have compiled my own kernels, using a vast array of options, 2.6.11, 2.6.12, 2.6.12.3, 2.6.13-rc4 and 2.4.27, they also all fail in exactly the same way. I have tried with and without initrd, acpi, 386 or other processor options, as well as very lean, stripped down kernels. I have tried with both lilo and grub, but both result in the same hang. Lilo or grub boots the kernel, and I see the classic: boot: vmlinuz Loading vmlinuz................................................. BIOS data check successful Uncompressing Linux... Ok. booting the kernel. [photo with this text is at http://be.back.l8r.net:8000/no_boot.jpg --adobriyan] Debian's 2.4.27-2 boots fine, and this is what really annoys me. I took Debian's 2.4.27-2 initrd config from /boot, ran make oldconfig on a fresh 2.4.27 tree (some minor options were different due to Debian's backpatching). This image _still_ would not boot. If needed, I could compile a few more kernels, change GCC versions (if anyone thinks that would help) and so on. However, my goal here is to get 2.6 working in order to support various bits of hardware on this laptop. There are very few bios options to change. :/ [Jesus Delgado <jdelgado@gmail.com> has the same problems with eMachines M6807 --adobriyan]
Created attachment 5437 [details] lspci output
AFAICS the problem is when the kernel is enabling the IOAPIC it just hangs. The work around is to boot with the "noapic" kernel boot parameter. I also have some problems with IRQs and with the ACPI implementation. There's a fixed ACPI DSDT you can download at acpi.sf.net. My laptop is a 1691WLMi but it's probably very similar, download the original DSDT, and check against your laptop's DSDT. I would gladly help people fix these problems, just say what you need to help fixing it.
I found a patch that makes the kernel boot without need for "noapic" and "pci=routeirq". Looks like this bug is a duplicate of bug 4700. http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4700
issue resolved.. it was UP_IOAPIC, not entirely sure how I missed it...
issue resolved.. Dropped from GCC 3.3 to GCC 2.95, got rid of UP_IOAPIC (not entirely sure how I missed UP_IOAPIC during compiles), and the issue has vanished... I anyone wants, I can compile various kernels against various gcc versions, if a better picture is needed/desired.