Regression in stable for ThinkPad T520 with Intel GPU (Sandybridge) between June 22 and July 18

[Sean Bruno]

On Tue, 2012-07-24 at 18:35 -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> I will shortly spend a bit of time tracking down the breakage more
> closely, but my 9-Stable system of June 22 runs fine. After an update
> on about July 10, I noted that it would hang after Xorg was started,
> but usually worked. After an upgrade to July 18, my system could no
> longer start Gnome. It would start Xorg and Gnome would start
> normally, getting many apps started, but about 10 seconds after the
> wallpaper loaded, the system would freeze solid. No network access and
> no response to mouse or keyboard.
> 
> I have looked into commits to 9-STABLE during the time at issue and
> very little seems to have changed due to the pre-9.1 freeze.
> Similarly, nothing much has changed in any of the X11 ports.
> 
> This really smells a lot like a race condition. I can trigger the same
> behavior by enabling VT-x (not VT-d) in BIOS. In all cases where it
> was intermittent, if my desktop completed startup, the system runs
> fine until re-booted. This is probably the primary reason I might not
> have realized that there was a problem as I don't boot the system
> often except when traveling, which I was between July 1 and July 6 and
> again July 18 when the system died.
> 
> Any idea what I might try looking at?


Oh good, its not just me.  I note that this is happens when I'm not
hardwired in at my docking station as the system doesn't get a routeable
IP addr, until much later if on wireless.

When watching the system boot, I think I might ctrl-c the sendmail
startup or something when it starts to keep this from happening.

Sean