Comment 342 for bug 204996

My attempts to compile at least a dozen kernels so far, leaving each running for either a week or until it froze, have led to varying degrees of confusion; kernels that I thought were good would freeze up or work for a week straight depending on, it seemed, the phase of the moon. Bisecting the kernel has taken a great deal of time, but has not, in the end, been particularly helpful. I've been reluctant to upgrade to Jaunty yet, since upgrading in the first place is what started all of this, and it could always get worse, but since the problem *seems* to be kernel-based, I can always just boot into the Intrepid kernel afterwards.

Future directions that I'll be working on:

I don't recall whether or not I actually removed the 'airo' module when I was using the wired ethernet for my connectivity. Seeing if that helps may be helpful in tracking down the actual bug.

I hadn't heard of netconsole ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/Netconsole ); since the bug locks the system hard enough that no logging information is available on the next boot, this may be a helpful avenue; if I can get a stack trace, I can even bring it upstream. (I would have done so already, but despite the time I've sunk into this disaster, I essentially know little more than I did when I started.) On the other hand, the wireless on my laptop is semi-broken enough (connection quality constantly wavers, and occasionally drops entirely, even though other wireless devices work fine) that this may not help. If that's the case, I'll connect it by wire and try to trigger the crash that way.