noAPIC
A few weeks ago, I bought an Acer Aspire, based on good past experience with the brand and a good sale. Much faster than what I had before, and fairly quiet.
When I went to install Ubuntu, it failed as described below, but it suggested a noapic option, and I tried that and it then proceeded to install. Things appeared to be going fairly well, in particular it could build mozilla-central much faster than I was used to.
First sign of problem: when I downloaded Windows 7 to another machine and rsync the result to this one, the md5 values didn’t match. Rerunning rsync caused some portions of the file to be updated, but the values still didn’t match. Repeated several times, and never got a match.
Dual boot Windows Vista and copy the file using Samba to an NTFS drive. The md5 values match. Boot back to Ubuntu and mount the NTFS drive and compute the md5 values, and they match again. Install Windows 7 under VirtualBox using this ISO, and all works fine.
Theory: the lack of APIC support causes issues under time of high interrupts, such as network downloads.
Note that The kernel development team have also overhauled APIC support for x86 systems in various places and extended it to include support for x2apic for 2.6.28. Intrepid is based on 2.6.27. Jaunty alpha 3 is based on 2.6.28. Download (to the other machine) and “burn” to a flash drive.
Boot, and see the same problem. Again, noapic allows me to progress further. Reproduction instructions:
F12; [select USB drive]; enter; English
Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer
[ 0.296001] ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC [ 0.296001] Kernel panic - not syncing: IO-APIC + timer doesn't work! Boot with apic=debug and send a report. Then try booting with the 'noapic' option. [ 0.296001]Repeat; this time selecting F6; ESC; tab
Add apic=debug to the “Boot Options”. Enter. Same thing.
Repeat, this time add apic=debug to the “Boot Options” before the --. Enter. Same thing.
Not sure what to try next, or how to send a report.