[Virtual-pkg-base-maintainers] Bug#610851: base: Crash at boot time

[Charles-Henry Houdemer]

Package: base
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system

Hello,

I have a rather serious problem here appearing after a fresh install.
It happens that my system crashes at boot time. But it does so intermitently.
First I will (try to) describe the symptoms, then the suspected culprit and
finally an ugly way to fix it.

So the symptoms :
Sometimes (around 3/4 times) my debian crashes when I try to boot it. To be
more precise, it happens as soon as just after the first fsck and might
happen a bit later. All that I can say is that a segmentation fault appears
along with its trace. And then it is impossible to do anything except a hard
reboot directly on the machine or with a sysrq.

The suspected culprit :
My ati 4870X2. My suspitions went on it because even updating the whole
system the problem remained. And also because it "could not" have been a
problem coming from the installer as it was used to install the same debian
on my laptop without problem. And also because the problem appeared again
after a second installation.

An ugly fix :
My suspitions on the graphic card, I wondered if the absence of the
proprietary firmware could be the cause. So I installed them. And the
problem disappeared (~10 reboots without any problem). Just to be sure, I
tried to remove them. And the problem is back.

So if you want any additional information, I am ready to do (nearly)
anything possible to help you. Have a nice day.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash