Bug 494596

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032713 Fedora/3.0.8-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.8

Attempts to boot Fedora 10 on an HP 2140 model business class netbook produce kernel hangs and occasional kernel crashes at boot time.

I believe this is a timing issue because adding the kernel parameter 'boot_delay=5' appears to resolve this.

Also, given 10 attempts to cold start the system without this parameter, 1 attempt or less will be a successful boot, 1 attempt will produce a kernel crash with the tail end of the crash output visible on the screen and 8 attempts will leave the kernel hung with the last line of output:

Freeing unused kernel memory: XXX free

The same results occur with the default Fedora 10 install kernel and at least two other kernels provided in March/April 2009 fedora updates.  No change between kernels.

I'm reporting this via bugzilla because this hardware platform (Intel Atom cpu, Intel 950GSE chipset) seems similar enough to other netbooks that an investigation might benefit more than just HP 2140 owners.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Boot HP 2140 netbook with fedora 10 installed 
2.At grub prompt, remove 'quiet' so kernel output is displayed.
3.
Actual Results:  
System will hang 80% or more of the time at exactly the same point.   Occasional kernel crash and occasional clean boot through to a normal, functional operating Fedora 10 environment.

Expected Results:  
Consistent clean boots without crashes or hangs

Boot parameter 'boot_delay=5' appears to slow something down and resolve this issue.