Comment 6 for bug 616745

Solved.

The lockup is caused by the phonet kernel module and as such affects only those who have the module loaded, namely those who connected a Nokia mobile phone to the PC before starting google-chrome.

An extremely efficient Nokia person indicated that

"Network namespace in the Phonet socket stack causes an OOPS when the
a namespace is destroyed. This occurs as the loopback exit_net handler
is called after the Phonet exit_net handler, and re-enters the Phonet
stack."

Chromium guys confirmed that the chrome sandbox uses namespaces, and hence the triggering of the bug.

The Nokia person has also provided a patch. It can be found as an attachment at the end of the thread http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=54617, together with the appropriate credits.

Note that the author reports:

"There is no easy way to fix this in kernel <= 2.6.32. As there
is no use for Phonet namespaces yet, disable them."

Please patch the Ubuntu Lucid kernel accordingly and release a fixed version. This should by no means affect the stability of the LTS kernel since phonet is not a commonly used feature and since Phonet namespaces are not yet used.

Alternatively, please blacklist phonet by default in Lucid.

Also, please propagate the fix upstream, noticing that this fix only applies to 2.6.32 and that a different fix will be provided for newer kernels.