Bug#690814: [squeeze->wheezy regression] disk activity provokes lockups on VIA EPIA CL-6000

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

# regression
severity 690814 important
quit

Hi Frank,

Frank Lenaerts wrote:

> I had to use the power button to restart the machine. The first time
> I rebooted, the system got stuck when trying to mount one of the
> filesystems. Rebooted again and got the login prompt. Did some more
> reboots and found out that the system hangs during more or less 50%
> of the reboots. Since the disk activity LED was always on, I tried
> to provoke some disk activity e.g. by installing some packages. This
> effectively locked up the system. I only once got the system in a
> locked up state without having the disk activity LED turned on.
[...]
> Since this machine had been running Lenny just fine, and Squeeze
> also worked fine, I decided to install a 2.6 kernel.
[...]
>                          Note that it took several reboots to get
> the deb file on the system and to install it. With this kernel, the
> box runs just fine.

Thanks for reporting it.

A few suggestions for moving forward:

 * please attach full "dmesg" output from a normal boot (with the
   2.6.32-based kernel)

 * could you also get a kernel log from booting the 3.2-based kernel?
   A full log including the lockup would be ideal --- netconsole[1]
   might help here.

 * if you have time to run a bisection search through the pre-compiled
   kernels at http://snapshot.debian.org/package/linux-2.6/ to find
   the first broken one, that could help narrow down things quite a bit.

Hope that helps, and sorry I have no better ideas,
Jonathan

[1] http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/netconsole.txt