Bug#277298: Kernel 2.6.x real time clock hang on Dell
I had the same problem with stock kernels hanging on bootup at the Real
Time Clock driver step.
I had installed Debian Sarge using rc1 of the debian-installer. Machine
is a Dell Dimension 4700 with a 3.0GHz HT P4. Installation went ok until
rebooting for the first time into the newly installed Debian system.
Hitting Control-C to skip the RTC driver and again to skip "Setting the
Hardware clock to System clock" (or whatever) would allow booting but then
on the initial base-setup the system would hang and no longer accept any
keyboard input.
Using the acpi=off option would get me past the RTC and "Setting the
Hardware clock..." steps but then I got some IRQ 193 error, which said "No
one cares".
Finally found this web site:
http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2004-November/023021.html
This is just a workaround but it now allows me to boot Debian stock
kernels with no problem. So far I've tried 2.6.8-1-686 and
2.6.8-1-686-smp. All files listed below were modified by adding a
"--directisa" option to the hwclock command. The files and line numbers
modified were:
/etc/init.d/hwclock.sh
lines 72, 104, 119
/etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh
lines 62, 75, 77, 80, 82
/usr/sbin/tzsetup
line 148
The /usr/sbin/tzsetup was what was causing the base-config to hang.
Package versions installed for me now:
ii util-linux 2.12-10 Miscellaneous system utilities
ii base-config 2.53.4 Debian base system configurator
ii kernel-image-2 2.6.8-10 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.8 on
PPro
# uname -a
Linux sh-slchen 2.6.8-1-686-smp #1 SMP Thu Nov 25 04:55:00 UTC 2004 i686
GNU/Linux
Hope that helps. I'm not sure if there is any other relevant information
that is needed, if so please let me know.
Swaine Chen
slchen <at> users <dot> sourceforge <dot> net
Reply to: