Bug 205076

Description of problem:

I did a BIOS update on my ASUS M2N-SLI DELUXE ACPI BIOS Revision 0201 to
Revision 0307 today and went through some kind of hell. After the BIOS update
the ACPI-Table was screwed up which gave me a kernel-panic (IO-APIC + timer
doesn't work) on the installed 2.6.17-1.2174_FC5smp kernel. A reboot with
'noapic' resolved this issue. As I also had trouble with my SIL680 IDE
controller, I decided to remove the card from the system. After restarting the
system I got the following kernel-oops (which I wrote down as I have no second
PC to debug):

---
Starting udev: BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual
address 000000
printing eip:
 *pde = 3701c001
Oops : 0000 [#1]
SMP
last sysfs file: /class/input/input0/event0/dev

Modules linked in: sata_nv libata scsi_mod snd soundcore snd_page_alloc
dm_snapshot dm_zero dm_mirror dm_mod ext3 jbd

CPU: 1
EIP: 0060:[<c05507e0>]  Not tainted VLI
EFLAGS: 00010206      (2.6.17-1.2174_FC5smp#1)
EIP is at make_class_name+0x29/0x88
eax: 00000000  ebx: ffffffff exc: ffffffff edx: 00000009
esi: f88f28fc  edi: 00000000 ebp: 00000000 esp: c215ad48
ds: 007b   es: 007b   ss:0068

Process modprobe (pid:405, threadinfo=x215a000 task=c2198bb0)

Stack: [...]

Call Trace
   class_device_del+0x91/0x14b  class_device_unregister+0x8/0x18 [libata]
   scsi_remove_host [scsi_mod]  ata_host_remove [libata]
   ata_device_add [libata]      nv_init_one [sata_nv]
   __driver_attach              pci_device_probe
   driver_probe_device          __driver_attach
   bus_for_each_dev             driver_attach
   __driver_attach              bus_add_driver
   __pci_register_driver        sys_init_module
   ata_port_start [libata]      vfs_read
   sysenter_past_esp

Code: [...]
EIP: [<c05507e0>] make_class_name+0x29/0x88  SS: ESP  0068:x21ad48
---

After a few reboots without further luck, I booted the non-smp kernel
2.6.17-1.2174_FC5 and to my surprise no error occured. The system was stable
again, but without effect on the smp kernel, which did not work anymore (the
same oops over and over). The next thing I did was to reinsert the SIL680
IDE-controller, which was a stupid idea because now even the non-smp kernel
stopped working with a similar oops (for which I did not have had the patience
to write it down). Even the removal of the controller did not solve anything.
The system was unusable. Using a rescue disk I tried the older kernel-version
2.6.16-1.2133_FC5smp with no luck and the same problem. 

The last thing I did was to install kernel 2.6.17-1.2611.fc6 which solved the
problem for me. This kernel has some other issues but at least it runs. Perhaps
reinitializing udev somehow would work around this problem, but I do not know
how to do this.

Unfortunately I have not much time at hand, so that I could find out which patch
solves the problem. 

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

I tested this with the following kernels:

2.6.17-1.2174_FC5[smp]
2.6.16-1.2133_FC5[smp]

udev-084-13.fc5.2