kernel bug

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 11:30 AM, amc <acrossonlnx at comcast.net> wrote:
> HP pavilion DV6258SE

  Thanks, that is likely to help.

>I haven't tried other distros on it in a while. I love how gentoo
portage systems
> work.

  Not saying Gentoo is bad, it just makes tech support difficult.  If
someone says "I'm running Debian 4.0" or "CentOS 5.0" or whatever, it
means we automatically know what versions of the kernel, glibc, X,
ndiswrapper, and so on are, and (just as important) how they were
configured and built.  Every Gentoo system is unique, by design.  That
has advantages, of course, but it also means your system is the only
one like it on Earth.  :-)  Since you're just running Gentoo, we'll
work with that.

  Did you compile APIC support into your kernel?  If so, try adding
"noapic" to your boot command line.  If not, trying rebuilding with
APIC enabled.  Googling for that laptop model code with keywords like
"linux" and "ndiswrapper" did find some discussion over whether APIC
helps or not.

> The kernel was crashing before gentoo init takes over.  its before any services
> are loaded. (the gentoo part of the system)

  I'm not sure that matters.  The distribution has a huge impact on
the kernel.  Kernel configuration options, any patches they apply,
build environment, and so on.  Also, ndiswrapper is a userland
program, so if ndiswrapper is involved, something is running in
userland.  It might be an initrd (initial RAM disk), which runs things
before init starts.  Or maybe it gets invoked by init before services
start; I have no idea how Gentoo's boot process works.

-- Ben