[olug] Fedora 17, XFCE fails to start Xorg - solved

[Jordan Fox]

I had a little time to look at my problem today.  Posting info as an FYI to
anyone who might care.

The specific error is "BUG soft lockup CPU#0 [biosdevname:486]"

sometimes it's CPU#1 and the last number, 486 is different all the time, so
it must not matter that much.  I found this bug report that I believe to be
the same issue as mine:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=801885

For now, I've added "biosdevname=o" to my boot parameters to disable the
device in question, which appears to be a networking card - possibly the
wifi card.  Adding the parameter causes the error to go away and the boot
to not hang.  I haven't had much time to work on this, but so far I haven't
noticed anything not working properly without the device enabled.
 Hopefully it'll be fixed in an software update.

Jordan


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and
petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace
of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and
minds in Christ Jesus."  Phil 4:6-7

"The shortest distance between a problem and a solution is the distance
between your knees and the floor."  Anonymous


On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 10:13 AM, Jordan Fox <vmifox at gmail.com> wrote:
> I installed XFCE spin last night and had a large number of updates as
> well.  Now I'm having problems booting...  The LXDE LiveCD wouldn't
> boot and was giving the same errors as I'm getting now with my
> install.  I haven't researched it yet.
>
> The errors are
> "BUG soft lockup CPU #0" - though I have gotten it for CPU#1 now too.
> rcu-sched detected stall
> segfault
> [sdb] asking for cache data failed  - I only have one hdd though
> [sdb] assuming drive cache: write through
>
> I get the last two about [sdb] several times, then usually the boot
> continues.  Sometimes everything seems to start fine - sometimes not.
> I'll let everyone know what I find... One of the updates was the
> kernel and I haven't tried booting from the original kernel yet to see
> if that fixes it.
>
> Jordan
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and
> petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the
> peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your
> hearts and minds in Christ Jesus."  Phil 4:6-7
>
> "The shortest distance between a problem and a solution is the
> distance between your knees and the floor."  Anonymous
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Kevin D. Snodgrass
> <kdsnodgrass at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>
>>> From: Jon Larsen <jon at jonlarsen.us>
>>> To: Kevin D. Snodgrass <kdsnodgrass at yahoo.com>; Omaha Linux User Group <
olug at olug.org>
>>> Cc:
>>> Sent: Friday, June 1, 2012 6:46 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [olug] Fedora 17, XFCE fails to start Xorg
>>>
>>> I remember reading somewhere that there is a bug in Nouveau for older
>>> nvidia cards.  I'm trying to find the reference, but I cannot find it.
>>> I believe it was on planet.fedoraproject.org.  Maybe it was
fedoraforum.org.
>>>
>>> You may need to wait for a nouveau/kernel update.
>>
>>
>> Problem was the install created an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that loaded
"vesa" instead of "nouveau".  Changing /etc/X11/xorg.conf to this:
>> Section "Device"
>>     Identifier "Videocard0"
>> #  Driver "vesa"
>>     Driver "nouveau"
>> EndSection
>>
>>
>> Fixed the problem.
>>
>> Now F17 looks good and the screen registration problem is mostly gone
too. YAY!
>> (On F13, F15 and Ubuntu 10.10/11.04/11.10/12.04LTS the screen is shifted
left and down and the mouse pointer is also off by the same number of
pixels.  Works correctly now.  This is NOT a screen issue, since the other
2 machines on this monitor work flawlessly via the KVM.)
>>
>> On a side note, after this fix I ran yum update, 145 updates on the base
install for something that just came out Tuesday...
>>
>>
>> Now if I can just get grub2 to behave...
>>
>> Kevin D. Snodgrass
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